BACKGROUND Despite limiting elastic recoil and late vascular remodeling after angioplasty, coronary stents remain vulnerable to restenosis, caused primarily by neointimal hyperplasia. Paclitaxel, a microtubule-stabilizing drug, has been shown to inhibit vascular smooth muscle cell migration and proliferation contributing to neointimal hyperplasia. We tested whether paclitaxel-coated coronary st...

Balloon angioplasty of the coronary arteries was first developed in the 1970s as an alternative means of revascularization to coronary artery bypass surgery. A major drawback with balloon angioplasty alone was the high rate of abrupt vessel closure resulting from acute arterial recoil and coronary artery dissection. The introduction of bare metal stents (BMS) in the early 1990s revolutionized p...

BACKGROUND The long-term safety and efficacy of drug-eluting coronary stents have been questioned. METHODS We evaluated 47,967 patients in Sweden who received a coronary stent and were entered into the Swedish Coronary Angiography and Angioplasty Registry between 2003 and 2006 and for whom complete follow-up data were available for 1 to 5 years (mean, 2.7). In the primary analysis, we compare...

Coronary stent implantation is currently performed in > 80% of percutaneous coronary interventions. Its main late complication is the development of in-stent restenosis (ISR), occurring in 10-80% of lesions treated in daily practice. The classification by Mehran et al. is most commonly used. Current therapeutic options to treat ISR include repeat balloon angioplasty, repeat stenting, cutting ba...

ow quickly time flies! It has now been a decade since eporting the first randomized trial of coronary stenting for cute myocardial infarction (AMI). At that time, it was hocking to think that one could place a metal foreign body nto a thrombogenic milieu and expect the artery to remain atent. Hence, we and others conducted several randomized rials comparing primary angioplasty and stenting, and...

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...

Objectives—To determine the eYcacy of coronary angioplasty as the sole method of revascularisation in patients with coronary artery disease and chronically dysfunctional but viable myocardium (hibernating myocardium), and to assess the eVect of restenosis on functional outcome. Design and patients—24 consecutive patients with hibernating myocardium were studied. Positron emission tomography was...

OBJECTIVE To report on the short-term and long-term results of patients who underwent a third coronary balloon angioplasty for a second restenosis and to identify the correlates of a third clinical restenosis. DESIGN A retrospective analysis of clinical, angiographic, and procedure related variables of a consecutive series of patients. PATIENTS 62 patients (mean (range) age 53 (31-72) years...

Due to the widespread use of stents in complex coronary lesions, stent restenosis represents an increasing problem, for which optimal treatment is under debate. "Debulking" of in-stent neointimal tissue using percutaneous transluminal rotational atherectomy (PTRA) offers an alternative approach to tissue compression and extrusion achieved by balloon angioplasty. One hundred patients (70 men, ag...

The technique of intracoronary stenting has achieved remarkable progress over the last few years. Improved stent deployment techniques and optimization of postprocedural management have dramatically improved the safety of intracoronary stent placement. At present, the incidence of early vessel closure after stenting is even lower than that after standard angioplasty and, as most operators no lo...