Prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors in patients undergoing CABG: brief report

Cardiovascular complications have very high incidence and are the main cause of mortality in human. Although the cardiovascular risk factors among apparently healthy subjects have been studied, these factors among patients who have undergone coronary artery bypass graft surgery have not evaluated clearly. The present study is a descriptive, cross-sectional survey on 1592 patients which suffered coronary artery bypass surgery (CABG) from May 2009 to May 2013 in Baqiyatallah Hospital, Tehran. Before surgery, all patients were carefully assessed and typical and atypical cardiovascular risk factors were determined and the desired data were collected. More than 70.8% of subjects were men and 29.2% were women. Average age of all patients was 60.39±7.5 years and the mean weight was 73.91±6.3 kg. Typical risk factors including: smoking, plasma cholesterol level, hypertension, diabetes mellitus and family history of cardiac problems, were common in these patients. Forty seven percent of patients had diabetes mellitus, 79.4% had hypercholesterolemia, 34.3% had a smoking history, 64.5% had hypertension and 44.2% of patients had a family history of cardiovascular disease. Among atypical risk factors, various types of angina (chest pain) had high prevalence (88.8% of all). Also, mean body mass index (BMI) were higher than normal (27.46±2.1) which showed the incidence of obesity among these patients. But, other atypical risk factors did not have high incidence. We demonstrated that typical and well known risk factors have also high prevalence in CABG patients. Our results indicates that we can recognize high risk persons with continuous and accurate screening as a safe and inexpensive preventive tool. This can be done in both apparently healthy subjects and in cardiovascular patients. We can prevent the occurrence of severe degrees of atherosclerosis and also CABG. So the cost and performing surgeries will be decreased.