Drug-Coated Stents May Decrease Your Risk for a Second Heart Attack

Brief History of Stenting

Stenting became common in the nineties based upon the work of various people throughout the seventies and eighties. The purpose of stenting originated from the cardiologist’s angioplasty procedures. The ballooning of the coronary arteries sometimes caused the arteries to collapse after surgery. The stent was developed to keep this from occurring.

What is A Stent

A coronary stent is essentially a wire-mesh tube which is placed into the artery after surgery to keep the artery from closing. Over the years this stent has been updated to be more versatile. One such method of versatility is the advent of the drug-coated stent used as a method to treat the artery so that scar tissue formation is minimized.

Benefits of Drug-Coated Stents

As stents have been around now for roughly a couple decades much research is surfacing on the performance of stenting and the benefits of stenting. One recent study of roughly 7,000 people published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that drug-coated stents are more effective at preventing heart attacks and surgeries two years after insertion than bare metal stents.

This finding is significant because over the last few years there has been concern over drug-coated stents causing an increased risk in blood clots in the patients they were used in. The drug-coated stent may indeed increase the likelihood of clots, this much is not substantiated, but the findings of drug-coated stents lowering heart attack risk is important. This shows that even risks for clots are higher the risk of the heart attack is lower and thus life is more likely to be extended.

Your Doctor Knows Best

Certainly your doctor knows more about this than I do and they will know the correct anti-clotting medication for you in any event. Simple Aspirin might even help; who knows. What is true though is that should you ever go through angioplasty and require a stent, it is OK to be open minded to the drug-coated stent as it has been shown to lower your risk for repeat heart attacks in patients. Be positive as this helps in recovery and think about starting a diet that is a natural defense to heart disease.

Source
Angioplasty.org
http://www.ptca.org/des.html
New England Journal of Medicine