Medicare claims show no added mortality risk from drug-eluting stents
Doctors at Dartmouth compared outcomes for people who had metal stents before the sirolimus-eluting stent became available with those for who later got the new stent called Cypher. There was virtually no difference in mortality, they report in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
As in prior studies, those who had the drug-eluting stent were less likely to need treatment for restenosis.
The drug-eluting stent certainly does no harm, conclude the authors, who compared data from nearly 67,000 individuals given stents on a non-emergency basis.
But they didn’t study the paclitaxel-eluting stent (Taxus) and could not assess the possible influence of dual-antiplatelet therapy.
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