Is There an Association Between Living in a Rural Area and the Incidence of Postoperative Complications or Hospital Readmissions Following Left Ventricular Assist Device (LVAD) Implantation, Compared to Urban Lvad Recipients? A Systematic Review.
Gollapudi, S., et al.Clinical Cardiology 2025; 48(1): e70068.
Aims
The review aimed to compare the link between living in a rural area versus an urban area on the incidence of postoperative complications or hospital readmissions in left ventricular assist devices (LVADs) recipients post-implantation.
Interventions
PubMed, Scopus, Embase, Web of Science, and Cochrane Library were searched for relevant literature. Two authors selected eligible studies. The methodological quality of the included studies was assessed using the the Newcastle‐Ottawa Scale (NOS) for non‐randomised studies and the Cochrane Risk of Bias tool for randomised controlled trials.
Participants
5 studies were included in the review.
Outcomes
The main outcome of interest was the association between geographic location and adverse events, hospitalisations, and mortality rates.
Follow-up
N/A
CET Conclusions
This systematic review investigated the relationship between geographic location (rural versus urban area) and the risk of postoperative complications following LVAD implantation. Five studies were included in total; however, the paper lacks a proper baseline characteristics table reporting the study design of each article. Although the authors mention using the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) criteria for assessing the quality of each outcome, and the Newcastle‐Ottawa Scale (NOS) and the Cochrane Risk of Bias tool for evaluating the risk of bias, their results have not been reported in this paper. The authors performed a narrative review and concluded that their findings may suggest that there may be an association between rural residency and a higher risk of certain postoperative complications and hospital readmissions in LVAD recipients following implantation. However, due to poor methodology and limited number of studies, it may be hard to draw firm conclusions based on this paper.
Trial registration
N/A