Bricker RS, et al. - In the Veterans Affairs Healthcare System, the cause of death among patients who died within 30 days of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) was assessed by researchers. Via a detailed chart review, they categorized the causes of death using definitions from the Academic Research Consortium. Within 30 days of PCI, the deaths of 1,674 patients were reported among overall 115,191 patients who underwent PCI during the study period. Cardiac causes were definitively found to be responsible for only a minority of deaths following percutaneous revascularization; an even smaller number of deaths were associated with PCI. Possible inappropriateness of 30-day mortality as a metric to evaluate procedural quality was suggested based on the finding that PCI directly accounted for such a small number of deaths. Most patients had an undifferentiated death not conclusively attributable to a single cause, and most cardiovascular deaths were not related to PCI.