CT or Cath first in stable chest pain patients? New data from the DISCHARGE Trial reveal what matters most to patients

Congratulations to Professor Jonathan Dodd and The DISCHARGE Trial Group on their recently published research in JAMA Cardiology, another successful publication from the DISCHARGE Trial.

The paper is titled ‘Health Status Outcomes After Computed Tomography or Invasive Coronary Angiography for Stable Chest Pain: A Prespecified Secondary Analysis of the DISCHARGE Randomized Clinical Trial’.

More than 3,500 patients across 26 centres in 16 European countries were followed for 3.5 years to evaluate how well coronary CT vs invasive coronary angiography (ICA) performed – not just clinically, but in terms of how patients actually feel.

Key insights at a glance:

• CT and ICA improved quality of life equally – with no significant differences across major subgroups.
• Women started with worse QOL, but showed greater improvements in physical health, anxiety, and overall well-being.
• Baseline chest pain severity, depression, and female sex predicted persistent angina at follow-up – regardless of the test used.

CT patients reported a unique improvement in depressive symptoms over time.
These findings challenge long-standing assumptions in diagnostic strategy and support a patient-centred approach to imaging in stable chest pain.

Read the full study here.

The Group are deeply grateful to all DISCHARGE trial authors, participants, and collaborators who made this work possible. This publication is another milestone in advancing evidence-based, human-focused cardiac imaging.

Below is a link to tctMD - an article has been written on the QoL paper from DISCHARGE:
https://www.tctmd.com/news/whether-angio-or-ct-come-first-evaluating-chest-pain-qol-after-similar