Stenting Small Coronary Arteries
Works in Progress
- Author Affiliation: Cardiovascular Diseases and Internal Medicine, Mayo Clinic and Foundation, Rochester, Minn.
- Corresponding Author: David R. Holmes, Jr, MD, Cardiovascular Diseases and Internal Medicine, Mayo Clinic and Foundation, 200 First St SW, Rochester, MN 55905 (holmes.david{at}mayo.edu).
Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text.
Interventional cardiology has a long and rich tradition of randomized clinical trials, the results of which have dramatically improved patient care. In the past few years, attention has particularly focused on drug-eluting stents, which have quickly become predicate devices (ie, against which new stents are compared). In the case of sirolimus-eluting stents, device approval was based in large measure on the 2 initial randomized clinical trials of RAVEL1 and SIRIUS.2 Based on the dramatic improvement in reducing restenosis with these devices demonstrated in these 2 trials, patients and physicians alike have embraced this new technology and physicians have used drug-eluting stents in subsets of patients for whom the data from trials were very limited. Early randomized trials of any device or drug typically target restricted “ideal” patient groups; this was certainly the case with the early drug-eluting stent trials. An important subset of patients that were not the …
