Self-expanding stents for primary percutaneous coronary intervention during acute myocardial infarction: did we find the right indication … at last!

Most young colleagues may not be aware of the fact that coronary stenting started back in Europe during the late 1980s with the delivery of self-expanding nitinol devices (1). The coronary Wallstent (Boston Scientific, Natick, Massachusetts) was indeed the first stent used in the coronary circulation, be it in grafted saphenous veins or in native coronary vessels of sufficient diameter (2). It is beyond the scope of this editorial to review the history and all the controversies of another age—details can be found in the relevant chapters of the PCR-EAPCI Textbook of Interventional Cardiovascular Medicine (3). We will summarize what we have learned and what applies today in relation to the paper by van Geuns et al. (4).