2018 ESC/EACTS Guidelines on myocardial revascularization

Introduction

These Guidelines represent the third time that the ESC and EACTS have brought together cardiologists and cardiac surgeons in a joint Task Force to review the ever-increasing body of evidence, with the mission of drafting balanced, patient-centred practice Guidelines on myocardial revascularization. Summaries of the key changes in comparison with the previous Guidelines are provided in Figures 1 and 2.

There is considerable overlap of the current document with other Guidelines, specifically those on stable coronary artery disease, non-ST-elevation myocardial infarction, ST-elevation myocardial infarction, heart failure, valvular heart disease and the Focused Update on Dual Antiplatelet Therapy. Unless supported by new evidence, we followed the recommendations of these Guidelines where pertinent to our Guidelines, and refer the reader to the respective sections in those documents for detailed discussion. We reserve more in-depth discussion for topics that are specific to issues pertaining to myocardial revascularization that are not covered in other Guidelines. To keep the current document concise and reader-friendly, we also moved some of the detailed descriptions of study results to the online Supplementary Data.