Coated Stents Better Than Bare Metal Ones in the Short Term

A new study reveals that angioplasty patients who receive stents coated with medication to prevent narrowing of the artery fare better after surgery than those who receive bare ones.

However, within three years of the procedure, patients with coated stents face a greater risk of more surgery to increase blood flow or even death, according to a study of 6,440 patients, expected to be published in the January issue of CMAJ.

“Despite recent concerns surrounding drug-eluting stent safety, the long-term survival [to three years] of patients receiving drug-eluting stents remains globally favorable and certainly not measurably worse than that of patients treated with bare metal stents,” study co-authors Drs. William Ghali and Andrew Philpott of the University of Calgary, said in a journal news release.” However, we did observe a concerning risk trend toward accelerating adverse events in the DES group late in the follow-up period — a finding that underlines the need for ongoing surveillance of longer-term outcomes.”

The study found that the death rate for people with drug-eluting stents was significantly lower than for those with bare metal stents in the first 30 days after the operation. It also noted that DES patients tended to be women and also had higher rates of kidney disease, diabetes, high cholesterol and hypertension.