Randomized trials did not consistently support superiority of ticagrelor, as monotherapy or in combination with aspirin, in terms of efficacy or safety, in patients with atherosclerotic artery disease.

Medline, EMBASE, the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, and scientific session abstracts were searched for trials of patients with coronary or peripheral artery disease (with >1,000 participants and a follow-up ≥3 months) randomly assigned to ticagrelor-based or conventional antiplatelet therapies. Trial-level hazard ratios (HRs) were pooled using a fixed- or random-effect model (in case of significant heterogeneity) with the inverse variance weighting. The primary outcome was all-cause mortality. Other outcomes were myocardial infarction (MI), stroke, and major bleeding.

Overall 77,489 patients received either ticagrelor-based (n = 38,721) or conventional antiplatelet regimens (n = 38,768) in 6 trials. The primary outcome occurred in 4.5% of patients treated with experimental therapy and 4.9% of patients treated with control therapy (HR = 0.91, 95% CI 0.81-1.01; P = .07). Overall, patients treated with ticagrelor-based versus conventional antiplatelet regimens showed no significant difference in terms of all-cause death, MI, stroke, or major bleeding after 20 months. However, in trials of patients with coronary artery disease as primary diagnosis, the risk for all-cause death (HR = 0.84 [0.77-0.91], P < .001) and MI (HR = 0.87 [0.80-0.94], P = .007) was significantly reduced by experimental therapy.

In patients with atherosclerotic artery disease, the benefit of ticagrelor-based therapies was confined to patients treated for coronary artery disease. The drug significantly reduced the risk for all-cause death and MI without excess risk of bleeding in these patients. In consideration of limitations of subgroup analyses, these results need further validation.