All-cause mortality and cardiovascular events with nicorandil in patients with IHD: systematic review and meta-analysis of the literature.

BACKGROUND:

Nicorandil is able to protect the cardiomyocytes from ischemic damage, but clear benefits of nicorandil in all-cause mortality and cardiovascular events were not consistently reported in patients with ischemic heart disease (IHD).

MATERIALS AND RESULTS:

Cochrane, PubMed, EMBASE, CBM, CNKI and Wangfang databases were searched for randomized controlled trials. Data on all-cause mortality and cardiovascular events were collected. Nicorandil groups were pooled to perform a comparison with control groups and to get the pooled odds ratios (ORs) and associated 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for all-cause mortality, relative risks (RRs), and associated 95% CIs for cardiovascular events. STATA 11.0 software was used for all-cause mortality and cardiovascular events statistics. We retrieved 17 randomized controlled studies enrolling a total of 7305 patients. The addition of nicorandil treatment significantly reduced cardiovascular events (13.83% versus 18.01%; RR, 0.77; 95% CI, 0.69 to 0.86). No differences in all-cause mortality (3.83% versus 4.70%; OR, 0.81; 95% CI, 0.64 to 1.02), and repeat revascularization rate (13.06% versus 13.54%; RR, 0.95; 95% CI, 0.70 to 1.29) were observed. There was a weak linear association between cardiovascular events and nicorandil in IHD with diabetes (P=0.099).

CONCLUSIONS:

The results suggest that nicorandil as an adjunct therapy to IHD is associated with reduced cardiovascular events in patients with IHD.