Paclitaxel-Eluting Stents in Complex Lesions

摘要

The study by Stone et al moves the field of drug-eluting stents closer to clinical practice but there is still a relatively long way to go. For instance, the investigators did not allow enrollment of patients with total occlusions, bifurca-tional, ostial, severely calcified, or thrombus-containing lesions. In addition, no multiple index lesions were included; this means that for the purpose of the end-point analysis only 1 lesion treated with the paclitaxel-eluting stent was evaluated. If drug-eluting stents were reserved only for lesions of this level of complexity, as many as 160 000 stents per month around the world10 might not have been implanted.