OBJECTIVES We evaluated whether patients' clinical status, angioplasty success, or both, should guide discharge after primary angioplasty (i.e., percutaneous coronary intervention [PCI]) for acute myocardial infarction (AMI). BACKGROUND Current guidelines do not address a discharge strategy for AMI patients undergoing successful PCI. METHODS Patients who underwent PCI in Primary Angioplasty...

BACKGROUND Few reports described outcomes of complete compared with infarct-related artery (IRA)-only revascularisation in patients with ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) and multivessel coronary artery disease (CAD). Moreover, no studies have compared the simultaneous treatment of non-IRA with the IRA treatment followed by an elective procedure for the other lesions (staged revascular...

INTRODUCTION There are limited data describing bioresorbable vascular scaffold (BVS) implantation in complex lesions. Only short-term clinical outcomes are available for patients with acute coronary syndrome (ACS). AIM To evaluate 12-month clinical outcome, safety and effectiveness of BVS implantation in complex lesions and in stable angina (SA) or ACS. MATERIAL AND METHODS Five hundred nin...

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to determine the long-term outcomes of surgical angioplasty for left main coronary artery (SA-LMCA) stenosis. METHODS We retrospectively analyzed data from 24 consecutive patients (mean age, 55 years; male/female, 12/12) who underwent a surgical angioplasty for the left main coronary artery (LMCA) stenosis at our institution between 1995 and 2002. We used ...

BACKGROUND The objective of this study was to assess the efficacy of sealing intermediate nonobstructive coronary saphenous vein graft (SVG) lesions with drug-eluting stents (DES; paclitaxel- or everolimus-eluting stents) for reducing major adverse cardiac events (MACE). METHODS AND RESULTS This was a randomized controlled multicenter clinical trial that enrolled patients with a previous coro...

AIMS To compare, by meta-analytical techniques, the clinical impact of bare-metal stenting vs. balloon angioplasty for the treatment of lesions in small coronary arteries. METHODS AND RESULTS We included trials with random allocation and prospective comparison of angioplasty vs. stenting, reference vessel diameter<3 mm, and follow-up>or=6 months. Random effect odds ratios (OR) for death, myoc...

coronary interventions (PCI) and the recent introduction of drug-eluting stents (DES) have led to a dramatic increase in the number of patients treated percutaneously. Bifurcation lesions are one of the complex lesion subsets that are now being confronted more frequently. Repeated studies have shown that bifurcation interventions, when compared to non-bifurcation procedures, have a lower rate o...

Percutaneous coronary laser thermal angioplasty was successfully performed before conventional balloon angioplasty in a 55 year old white man with a 90% left anterior descending artery stenotic lesion and angina at rest (Canadian Heart Association class IV). The lesion was reduced to 50% residual stenosis using a 1.7 mm laser-heated metallic capped fiber and two pulses of 8 W of argon laser ene...

Although thallium-201 exercise scintigraphy has been established for the detection of myocardial ischemia and viability, little is known regarding the myocardial thallium-201 kinetics during angioplasty. Herein, we report a 77-year old man with angina pectoris, in whom serial myocardial imaging after a single dose of thallium-201 was helpful in identifying not only the culprit lesion and myocar...

The DEFINITION (Impact of the complexity of bifurcation lesions treated with drug-eluting stents) study has provided a novel classification to evaluate the complexity of coronary bifurcation lesion according to coronary angiography, but angiographic imaging due to its low resolution and inherited limitation may result in an inaccurate adjudication.We used optical coherence tomography (OCT) to f...