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Background: Percutaneous coronary intervention of severely calcified coronary lesions is associated with a higher risk of adverse events in women compared with men. Methods: EMPOWER CAD (NCT05755711) is a prospective, multicenter, single-arm "real-world" study of women receiving intravascular lithotripsy (IVL) to treat calcific coronary artery lesions. The 30-day primary safety end point was target lesion failure (TLF), a composite of cardiac death, myocardial infarction (MI), or ischemia-driven target lesion revascularization. Procedural success was defined as successful stent delivery with residual stenosis ≤30% without in-hospital TLF. Results: < .0001). Conclusions: In the real-world EMPOWER CAD study, an IVL-first strategy demonstrated a favorable safety profile, high procedural success, and significant stenosis reduction and quality of life improvement at 30 days, consistent with or better than prior IVL studies performed in predominantly male populations.
McEntegart et al. (Tue,) studied this question.