Vascular responses to percutaneous coronary intervention with bare-metal stents and drug-eluting stents: a perspective based on insights from pathological and clinical studies.

The era of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) has led to substantial changes in the management of patients with acute coronary syndromes and stable coronary heart disease, with an associated range of impacts on the course and outcomes of subsets of patients with these conditions. Interventional cardiology has moved from percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA), with or without administration of tissue plasminogen activator or other thrombolytic agent, to the combined use of PTCA and implantation of a bare-metal stent (BMS) or multiple stents, to PTCA and implantation of 1 or more drugeluting stents (DES) (1–3). As first-generation DES,