BACKGROUND Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) and percutaneous coronary revascularization (PCI) are strategies for treating coronary disease. Because the principal limitation of PCI is restenosis, CABG might be favored for those at high risk for restenosis. Using a clinical risk score for predicting restenosis, we examined whether patients with higher risks for restenosis were preferentially r...

BACKGROUND Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) has emerged as an alternative treatment to coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) for unprotected left main (LM) coronary artery disease, but the results of both treatments are less clear in real-world practice. We aimed to assess the long-term outcomes of unprotected LM disease treated with CABG or PCI with stenting in high-risk population fr...

BACKGROUND Little is known about the clinical value of stress imaging studies in asymptomatic patients after percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). METHODS AND RESULTS Residents of Olmsted County, MN, who underwent PCI were followed up for the occurrence of stress imaging (stress nuclear or stress echocardiography), coronary angiography, or coronary artery bypass grafting (without angiogra...

M ultiple, large randomised trials comparing primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) with fibrinolytic therapy for ST elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) have shown that primary PCI results in lower rates of death, reinfarction, and stroke. Consequently, primary PCI has become the preferred reperfusion strategy for STEMI. Unfortunately, primary PCI is available in only a minority o...

BACKGROUND Practice guidelines recommend regional systems of care for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. However, whether emergency medical services should bypass nonpercutaneous cardiac intervention (non-PCI) facilities and transport out-of-hospital cardiac arrest patients directly to PCI centers despite longer transport time remains unknown. METHODS AND RESULTS Using the Cardiac Arrest Registr...

Percutaneous coronary interventions (PCI) may be performed during the same session as diagnostic catheterization (ad hoc PCI) or at a later session (delayed PCI). Randomized trials comparing these strategies have not been performed; cohort studies have not identified consistent differences in safety or efficacy between the two strategies. Ad hoc PCI has increased in prevalence over the past dec...

Background—Platelet glycoprotein (GP) IIb/IIIa antagonists prevent the composite end point of death or myocardial infarction (MI) in patients with acute coronary syndromes. There is uncertainty about whether this effect is confined to patients who have percutaneous coronary interventions (PCIs) and whether PCIs further prevent death or MI in patients already treated with GP IIb/IIIa antagonists...

The place to begin is with a brief discussion of the general case: percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) versus coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) for all anatomic varieties of coronary disease. Daemen et al1 pooled 3051 patients from 4 randomized trials comparing CABG with PCI using bare metal stents (BMS). At 5 years, PCI and CABG were similar with respect to death, myocardial infarction ...

BACKGROUND Subjective health status is an increasingly important parameter to assess the effect of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) in clinical practice. Aim of this study was to determine medical and psychosocial predictors of poor subjective health status over a 10 years' post-PCI period. METHODS We included a series of consecutive PCI patients (n = 573) as part of the RESEARCH regi...

Protein C inhibitor (PCI) and plasminogen activator inhibitor 3 (PAI-3; urinary urokinase inhibitor) are immunologically identical. The role of PCI for urokinase (uPA) inhibition in vivo was investigated. We therefore developed an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) specific for uPA-PCI complexes: Rabbit anti-PCI IgG was immobilized on a microtiter plate and following incubation with uPA-...