Coronary drug-eluting stents are commonplace in clinical practice with acceptable safety and efficacy. Preclinical evaluation of novel drug-eluting stent technologies has great importance for understanding safety and possibly efficacy of these technologies, and well-defined preclinical testing methods clearly benefit multiple communities within the developmental, testing, and clinical evaluatio...

Background—The objective was to evaluate the role of risk factors and stent type for stent thrombosis (ST) using a large real world registry. Methods and Results—We evaluated all consecutive coronary stent implantations in Sweden from May 1, 2005, to June 30, 2007. All cases of ST, documented in the Swedish coronary angiography and angioplasty registry until September 21, 2008, were analyzed. S...

Stents represent a major advance in the treatment of obstructive coronary artery disease since the advent of balloon angioplasty. The number of percutaneous coronary interventions performed each year has expanded considerably since the early days. Angioplasty procedures doubled in Europe between 1992 and 1996,1 while an estimated 601 000 percutaneous coronary revascularizations were performed i...

The introduction of drug-eluting stents (DES) has rapidly and profoundly affected the field of interventional cardiology, and DESs are now used in a majority of intracoronary stenting procedures. As a result of the innumerable “trial-and-error” endeavors, DESs have emerged as a potential solution for solving the problem of restenosis. DESs are coated stents capable of releasing single or multip...

n the history of percutaneous coronary intervention, drug-eluting stents (DES) are recognized as revolutionary technologies with their unique ability to provide both mechanical and biological solutions simultaneously to the target lesion. While the clinical success of DES depends on these 2 properties, the ability of the operator to properly deploy the device is also of utmost importance. Altho...

Drug-eluting stents represent a significant evolution in the therapy of coronary artery disease. Recently, restenosis and thrombosis related to drug-eluting stent fractures have been described. This work reports a case of fracture of a drug-eluting stent 18 months after implantation, associated with restenosis.

BACKGROUND Drug-eluting stents effectively reduce restenosis but may increase late thrombosis and delayed restenosis. Persistent polymer, the drug, or a combination of both could be responsible. Local delivery of Biolimus A9, a rapamycin derivative, from a polymer-free BioFreedom stent (Biosensors International) may prevent these complications. METHODS AND RESULTS We compared high-dose (HD) (...

BACKGROUND We describe the rationale and design for the 'PercutAneous INTervention with biodegradable-polymer based paclitaxel-eluting or sirolimus-eluting versus bare stents for de novo coronary lesions - PAINT trial'. OBJECTIVES To evaluate two novel formulations of paclitaxel-eluting stent and the sirolimus-eluting stent against a stent with the same metallic structure but without polymer ...