Michelle Graham was also part of the UAlberta research team to reveal women with cardiovascular disease may receive different health care than men―and experience worse outcomes.
Lead author of international study finding aspirin can help prevent heart attacks in non-cardiac surgery patients who previously had a coronary stent, Michelle Graham was lauded by the Department of Medicine as recipient of the Paul W. Armstrong Research Award.
Approximately 200 million adults around the world undergo major non-cardiac surgery annually, so the study results will have a big impact on this large patient group.
"This is your next-door neighbour who had angioplasty five years ago, feels fine and needs to go in for hip surgery," said Graham. "There will be a big knowledge translation push with our colleagues in anesthesia and surgery to remind them that we want them to continue to give aspirin to this group of patients, when for most other groups we're recommending they stop."
These results were a substudy of POISE-2, a large international study with sites in 135 centres, including Edmonton, in 23 countries. Patients with previous percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) were enrolled in 82 centres in 21 countries. The study was published in Annals of Internal Medicine and funding for the Canadian study was largely provided by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.