BACKGROUND The use of a drug-eluting balloon for the treatment of de novo coronary artery lesions remains to be evaluated. A previous trial in patients with stable and unstable angina comparing a bare metal stent mounted on a drug-eluting balloon with a sirolimus-eluting stent failed to meet the prespecified non-inferiority criteria versus the sirolimus-eluting stent. The stent struts of a bare...

Coronary restenosis consists of the partial/total re-occlusion of the artery lumen following percutaneous transluminal angioplasty (PTCA). In order to match this pathology, PTCA is followed by the implantation of rigid scaffolds (stent or coated stent) aimed to contrast the most important mechanical (coronary wall elastic recoil and late remodelling) and biological (smooth muscle cells iper-pro...

Percutaneous coronary intervention with stent placement is one of the most frequently performed procedures in the western world. Patients with coronary stents need to be on dual antiplatelet therapy in order to minimize the risk of stent thrombosis. When these patients undergo surgical procedures, the risk of stent thrombosis needs to be balanced against the risk of bleeding in the perioperativ...

Clinical Case A 58-year-old male was presented with an ST-elevation inferior myocardial infarction. Emergency medical services administered 325 mg of aspirin and sublingual nitroglycerin en route to the emergency room. In the emergency room, the patient received 600 mg of clopidogrel and a heparin bolus. Coronary angiography revealed complete occlusion of the distal right coronary artery with t...

T he relation between the angiographic severity of a coronary lesion and its functional significance has been studied extensively for native coronary lesions. Diameter stenosis, lesion length, lesion eccentricity, and lesion complexity have been found in both in vitro and in vivo studies to determine the haemodynamic relevance of a coronary lesion. 3 In a recent meta-analysis, nearly 60% of pat...

We report the case of a 66-year-old man with a left anterior descending (LAD) coronary artery aneurysm. Cigarette smoking and hepatitis C virus infection were in his clinical history. Coronary angiography performed in 2002 showed a LAD aneurysm, a 50% stenosis of the right coronary artery, and a 30% stenosis of the left main artery (Figure 1, a through c). The ECG in 2002 was normal (Figure 2bi...

BACKGROUND There are limited studies of stent thrombosis in the modern era of second-generation stents, high-pressure deployment, and current antithrombotic regimens. METHODS AND RESULTS Six recently completed coronary stent trials and associated nonrandomized registries that enrolled 6186 patients (6219 treated vessels) treated with >/=1 coronary stent followed by antiplatelet therapy with a...

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to examine which component of drug-eluting stents (DES) plays a major role in enhanced coronary vasoconstricting responses after DES implantation in pigs. BACKGROUND Recent studies have reported unremitting angina due to vasomotion abnormalities even after successful DES implantation. However, it remains to be elucidated which component of DES (metal stent...

Coronary artery stenting has become the most important nonsurgical treatment for coronary artery disease. However, in-stent restenosis occurs at a relatively high rate and this problem has led to the routine use of invasive angiography for assessing stent patency. Although coronary angiography is the clinical gold standard and it is a very effective diagnostic tool for detecting such in-stent r...

One of the relevant phenomenon associated with in-stent restenosis in coronary arteries is an altered haemodynamics in the stented region. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) offers the possibility to investigate the haemodynamics at a level of detail not always accessible within experimental techniques. CFD can quantify and correlate the local haemodynamics structures which might lead to in-ste...