Drug-eluting stents (DES) have gained widespread adoption being implanted in over 6 million patients worldwide demonstrating significant improvements in clinical efficacy combined with comparable safety to bare metal stents.
An investigational drug-eluting stent called Xience, coated with everolimus, led to significantly less late lumen loss after nine months than did the Taxus (paclitaxel-eluting) stent, said researchers here today. March 2007
An investigational bioabsorbable coronary artery stent, in its first human trials, showed acceptable safety, with efficacy better than bare-metal devices but well short of drug-eluting devices, Dutch researchers said here.
Two Swiss meta-analyses have found an increased rate of myocardial infarction and death with the Cypher (sirolimus-eluting) coronary stent, which is likely to put a serious chill in interventional cardiology's infatuation with drug-coated devices
We must optimize stent deployment & maintain a registry of how well (or poorly) we use drug-eluting stents. Instead of asking “Which stent?” or “How much anti-platelet therapy?” we must ask “How effectively are we deploying our stents?”