Introduction: Systemic atherosclerosis can result in both coronary artery disease (CAD) and carotid artery disease. Recently it has been shown that patients with CAD have a higher incidence of microembolization during carotid artery stenting (CAS), and it has been hypothesized that they could be at higher risk in this intervention.
Material and methods: We retrospectively evaluated an institutional registry with 437 consecutive patients who underwent coronary angiography and CAS to evaluate their short-term outcomes and long-term survival with regard to the presence of coexisting multivessel coronary artery disease (MVD).
Results: We performed 220 CAS procedures in MVD patients and 318 CAS procedures in non-MVD patients. The incidence of in-hospital CAS-related adverse events was 2.7% and 2.5% in the MVD and non-MVD groups, respectively (p = 0.88). At 30 days, there was no significant difference between the groups in terms of the number of patients with adverse events (hierarchically death/stroke/myocardial infarction; 8.8% vs. 5.5%; p = 0.18). The median duration of follow-up was 4.23 years. Survival free of all-cause mortality at 1, 3 and 5 years was 90% (95% CI: 86–94%), 79% (95% CI: 73–85%) and 70% (95% CI: 64–77%), and 92% (95% CI: 89–95%), 85% (95% CI: 80–90%) and 76% (95% CI: 70–82%) for the MVD and non-MVD groups (p = 0.02), respectively.
Conclusions: These results suggest that patients with MVD combined with carotid artery disease are probably not at higher risk of early post-CAS adverse clinical events, but they have significantly worse long-term survival rates.