Medicated Stents Safe after Heart Attack, Study Concludes

A large study came out today with the fresh evidences about the safety of medicated stents (a.k.a "drug coated stents" or "drug-eluting stents" or "DES") and showed that widely used medicated stents slash the risk of death for people who have heart attacks by 16% than bare-metal stents.

Lead author of the study, Dr. Laura Mauri, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and an interventional cardiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital, said, "We were looking to see if there was a risk, and we actually saw there was a benefit."

Drug coated stents or medicated stents were introduced in 2003. The tiny wire tubes, about the size of a pen spring, have become fastest-selling medical devices in history, used in millions of people worldwide. Almost 6 million patients have received medicated stents since its launch.

The longest and largest study conducted on more than 7,000 people, who were treated with a stent for a heart attack (drug coated or bare metal) in Massachusetts in 2003 and 2004, showed that the death rate, incidence of second heart attacks, and need for another arterydefine-opening procedures were much lower in patients treated with drug coated stents.

The researchers followed the subjects for two years, and compared the data of each drug coating stent patient with a bare-metal stent patient. They found that of all people who were treated with drug coated stents, 10.7 percent died within two years, compared with 12.8 percent who were treated with bare metal stents.

10.7 percent of people who received drug coated stents required new artery-opening procedures as compared to 14.9 percent of those getting bare-metal stents.

Previous year, a high profile Danish study came up which said that the coatings of the drug stents could cause fatal clots, which made people uneasy about the medical device but the researchers say that the findings suggest that people who've already had heart attacks need not fear from the new stents.

According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), US, approximately 1.1 million people suffer from heart attacks every year and fifty percent of them die. Of the 1 million stents implanted in American patients annually, about 50 percent of them are used for people who have heart attacks. Drug-coated versions cost about $2,400, compared with $800 for their bare-metal counterparts.

Laura Mauri said, "Heart attacks are a life-threatening condition where physicians need to decide quickly what the best way is to open the blocked artery."

"We conducted this study to understand whether drug-eluting stents are safe in this situation. It is very reassuring that drug-eluting stents were actually associated with better survival and fewer repeat procedures," Mauri added.

The new stents are coated with medication that decreases scar formation on the vessels and prevent vessels from reclogging and the patients who receive them usually take anti-clotting medicine, which also might improve survival, she said.

Mauri adds that the latest study "is very important, because it is a large study with long-term follow-up."

The findings appear in the Sept. 25 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.