Drug Eluting Stents

Drug Eluting Stents or better alternatives?

The stop to drug eluting stents has come or at least the process to them has become? Millions of patients have been implanted with these metallic meshes to prevent and cure atherosclerosis, but now many doubts rise on the long term reliability of these biomedical devices, especially on their novel approach provided by drug eluting stents. Cardiologists adopted with enthusiasm this high tech but also high cost solution, with the promise to drastically reduce in stent restenosis, the pathology which leads to stent deployment failure in 15-30% of patients. From 2004, when two types of drug eluting stent have been approved by Food and Drug Administration (FDA), these biomedical endo prostheses shifted their usage from only high risk patients to almost all non-invasive surgical procedures (80% of implanted stents are currently drug eluting stents). Higher costs for the health services, but higher profits for stent manufacturers, that invested a lot of money in drug eluting stent technology. In the middle, rising concern about a crescent incidence of thrombosis and heart attacks following drug eluting stent deployment.

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