Study populations
For this retrospective cohort study, we extracted and analyzed the medical data of 177 patients with past histories of SAVR at Ome Municipal General Hospital, Tokyo, Japan, between April 2009 and May 2019. Among them, 140 patients (79.1%) underwent SAVR at our hospital, and the remaining 37 (20.9%) presented to the outpatient clinic after SAVR that was performed in the other hospital.
Thirty-seven patients with follow-up <1 year were excluded. All patients underwent transthoracic echocardiography (TTE) and coronary angiography as a part of screening before SAVRs. We also excluded patients with structural heart diseases except for primary aortic valve diseases. The other structural heart diseases included a history of coronary artery disease, myocarditis, infiltrative heart diseases, including cardiac sarcoidosis and amyloidosis, congenital heart diseases, and other cardiomyopathies, such as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) and dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM). Subsequently, the following patients were excluded: 29 with a history of ischemic heart disease, including old myocardial infarction and treatment history of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) or coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG); 1 patient with atrial septal defect (ASD); and 1 patient with ventricular septal defect (VSD). Finally, the data of 109 patients who had undergone SAVR without diagnosed structural heart diseases other than primary aortic valve diseases were analyzed retrospectively.