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The drug-eluting stent has been extremely successful in reducing restenosis from the 20-30% range to single digits.
According to one study (of over 900 patients), only 3.7 percent of the patients with the drug-coated stent had renarrowed versus 10.9 percent of the patients who had received a standard stent.
Despite the fact that symptomatic coronary disease afflicts men and women equally, only 33 percent of the 1.2 million interventional procedures conducted in the U.S. each year are done on women.
Studies show that men and women had comparable low rates of cardiac death after treatment with the drug-eluting stents: 0.5 percent in women, 1.7 percent in men. Similarly, the heart attack rates were also comparably low: 2.7 percent in women, 3.8 percent in men.
In a study involving 160 people with diabetes, arteries of patients given drug-coated stents narrowed by an average of only 0.06 millimeters, compared to 0.47 millimeters for the arteries of those given bare-metal stents, the researchers reported.
This can reduce repeat angioplasties by up to 30 percent and most likely reduce the price of caring for patients with heart disease.
Marketing analysts predict that drug-eluting stents will double the current world market for stents to $5 billion annually.
Drug-eluting stents are now the standard of care for most routine patients, and as clinical trials continue to show benefit in cases such as diseased coronary bypass grafts and smaller coronary arteries, their use will expand. And just as the current generation of drug-eluting stents are replacing bare metal stents, research is ongoing into the next generation of drug-eluting stents.
Nanotechnology is being used to create stents that have much smaller struts, and stents with tiny wells built into the metal framework to hold medication, an improvement over the somewhat bulky polymer coating that is currently used. Most cardiologists agree that the drug-eluting coronary stents have revolutionized the care of patients with critical coronary disease, and this may be one example where the product lives up to the hype, even if the marketing does not.
