New Heart Stent
April 23, 2008 by madhavgopalkrish
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Next-generation heart stent beats older device | Science | Reuters - Annotated
- Stents are wire mesh tubes inserted into coronary arteries that have been cleared of blockages. Drug-releasing versions help prevent vessels from reclogging.
- A next-generation artery-opening device from Abbott Laboratories Inc . the Xience drug-eluting stent, worked as well or better than an older stent.
- Patients using the Xience drug-eluting stent, had far fewer heart attacks and heart-related deaths after one year, the researchers reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
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Results of the company-funded study of 1,000 patients proved thet Xience as significantly better at preventing scar tissue from renarrowing treated vessels, a measure known as in-segment late loss.
It also worked as well as Taxus in reducing rates of target vessel failure, a measure of re-treatment needed either because the device did not work or because of heart attacks or death.
And it cut major adverse cardiac events — including heart attacks and heart-related deaths — by 42 percent after one year.
