The retrospective cohort study that enrolled patients with coronary artery disease treated at the Nork Marash Medical Center in Yerevan, Armenia from 2006 to 2008, reported that the baseline profile of women undergoing percutaneous coronary revascularization (PCI) differed significantly from that of men. Despite these differences, the unadjusted event-free survival at the end of 3-year follow-up is similar between sexes. Diabetes status, however, affects the long-term PCI outcomes of men and women differently. In patients without diabetes, men have more than two times the hazard of developing major cardiovascular outcomes than women, while the opposite is observed in patients with diabetes.
AUA MPH Alumna and lead author Yeva Sahakyan, MD, MPH (2011) and her coauthors Lusine Abrahamyan, MD, PhD, MPH (2003), Clinical Epidemiologist at the Toronto Health Economics and Technology Assessment (THETA) Collaborative, University of Toronto and Michael E. Thompson, MS, DrPH, Associate Professor of Public Health Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Adjunct Associate Professor at AUA report these findings in their manuscript “Sex differences in long-term outcomes of patients with percutaneous coronary intervention: the Armenian experience” published in September 2013 in the Healthcare in Low-resources Settings, a new Open Access online-only, internationally ranked peer-reviewed academic journal (please visit http://www.hlsjournal.org/ to read the full article).
Associate Dean of the School of Public Health Varduhi Petrosyan notes, “this manuscript resulted from Yeva’s MPH thesis project. This was the first study that evaluated sex differences in cardiovascular disease management and outcomes in Armenia. The study was possible thanks to a long-term partnership for hospital quality improvement with the Nork Marash Medical Center. The partnership has produced a number of MPH thesis papers that were published in important peer-reviewed journals.”
The AUA School of Public Health works actively to improve the health of the populace and health services in Armenia and the region through interdisciplinary education and development of public health professionals and others to be leaders in public health, health services research and evaluation, and health care delivery and management.