EDC team publishes innovative methods paper in Annals of Internal Medicine

A manuscript published in the Annals of Internal Medicine applies innovative target trial emulation methods to compare four distinct transfusion strategies using data from the Myocardial Ischemia and Transfusion (MINT)  trial.  The paper was led by University of Pittsburgh graduate student Gerard Portela with Epidemiology Data Center co-director and investigator Maria Mori Brooks.  The authors found that 30-day risk of death or recurrent myocardial infarction among patients with acute myocardial infarction and anemia increases progressively, relative to a < 10 g/dL strategy, with lower hemoglobin concentration thresholds for transfusion.  This suggests that more restrictive thresholds may increase incidence of death or heart attack in this patient population.  The imprecision of the estimates, however, prevents explicit recommendations about individual hemoglobin individual thresholds.

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M24-0571

Portela GT, Carson JL, Swanson SA, Alexander JH, Hébert PC, Goodman SG, Steg PG, Bertolet M, Strom JB, Fergusson DA, Simon T, White HD, Cooper HA, Abbott JD, Rao SV, Chaitman BR, Fordyce CB, Lopes RD, Daneault B, Brooks MM; MINT Investigators. Effect of Four Hemoglobin Transfusion Threshold Strategies in Patients With Acute Myocardial Infarction and Anemia: A Target Trial Emulation Using MINT Trial Data. Ann Intern Med. 2024 Nov;177(11):1489-1498. doi: 10.7326/M24-0571. Epub 2024 Oct 1. PMID: 39348705.