Following the great success of the Egyptian national pPCI registry programme (5,749 patients enrolled between 2011 and 2017) that, on one hand, showed a significant improvement in the implementation of the best treatment strategy (with respect to the time factor) aiming at a better outcome for STEMI patients and, on the other hand, documented the STEMI incidents helping to identify the barriers preventing the delivery of proper cardiovascular care to this patient population, the time had come for the second phase of the national initiative – the Acute Coronary Syndrome (ACS) registry – to be launched.

The ACS registry programme begun after the launch of the Awareness and Training Campaign for the Treatment of Acute Coronary Syndrome in Cairo in November 2018. A joint protocol between Stent-Save a Life! Egypt and the ACS Academy – and powered by AstraZeneca – was signed under the auspices of the Egyptian Society of Cardiology. All parties agreed on the overall objective that is to rescue patients with acute coronary syndromes.

One of the primary goals of the Egyptian ACS registry programme is to establish a database of ACS patients since there are today no accurate data regarding those patients even though heart disease is the first cause of mortality in Egypt and a thrombus is considered the main cause of heart failure too if not treated within 6 hours of onset.
A priority of the Egyptian Stent-Save a Life! organisation is also to ensure that rapid and effective steps are taken to reduce the time lag between crisis occurrences and a life-saving medical intervention is initiated.

In coordination with the Egyptian Stent-Save a Life! Country Champion, Prof. Khaled Shokry, the company ICOM manages the registry from setting-up the online system through a technical portal, monitoring the records and data to analysing the results of the study.

Almost a year later – and a lot of hard work and brainstorming sessions to seek innovative ideas that would encourage junior physicians to submit cases – the number of patients enrolled in the registry reached 1,326 – of which 836 STEMI cases and 490 non-ST Elevation ACS – from 19 different centres across 10 Egyptian governorates. Additionally, 76 new centres have been approached to join the registry with the aim to obtain a more accurate picture thanks to the representation of all governorates.

ICOM also manages the follow-up with the centres on a daily basis and a monthly progress report is formulated to track the flow and type of submissions. A monitoring process, based on randomly selected patients, takes place periodically to confirm the accuracy of the CRF filling, in comparison to the original documents, and to check the signed informed consents.

The next step of the ACS registry programme is a meeting that will be held this month with the representatives of the participating centres in order to learn about the barriers and obstacles that have been faced so far and therefore understand the needs for an improved situation.
The Stent-Save a Life! team is really hopeful that all these efforts will help gain a deep insight into the ACS patients’ needs and enable to plan for the future, according to the population and database collection, in order to ultimately preserve the Egyptian citizens’ lives.