Drug Coated Stents Better After Heart Attack

Sept. 25 -- WEDNESDAY, Sept. 24 (HealthDay News) -- Drug-coated stents are more effective than the bare metal kind for people who have heart attacks, a new study finds.

The death rate, incidence of second heart attacks, and need for new artery-opening procedures were lower for those getting drug-coated stents, said a report in the Sept. 25 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine on more than 7,000 people treated for heart attacks in Massachusetts in 2003 and 2004.

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

In the two years after stents were implanted in arteries reopened after a heart attack, 8.5 percent of the 4,016 recipients of drug-coated stents died, compared to 11.6 percent of the 3,201 recipients of bare-metal stents. Second heart attacks struck 7.4 percent of coated stent recipients and 8.5 percent of those getting bare-metal stents. And new artery-opening procedures were required for 10.7 percent of the coated stent recipients, compared to 14.9 percent of those getting bare-metal stents.

The results are close to those reported in May by a group led by Dr. Peter W. Groeneveld, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, who analyzed Medicare data on 72,000 stent recipients.

"Our population was slightly different from theirs," Groeneveld said. "We used both patients who had heart attacks and didn't, but the relative difference in rates of death and heart attacks after the procedures seems to be what we found."

The new study "is very important, because it is a large study with long-term follow-up," Mauri said.

"The strength of this study is that these guys have more detailed clinical information on the patients than we did," Groeneveld said. "The results are very similar. We think we are looking at the same thing."