Drug-Eluting Stents For Leg Arteries

From the wire: Peripheral arterial disease is common in the lower extremities and sometimes leads to severe obstructions known as critical limb ischemia (CLI), a condition in which the decreased blood flow causes pain and skin ulcers.

“CLI is today a major health problem, especially in Western societies and is associated with high morbidity and mortality rates,” said Dimitris Karnabatidis, the lead researcher and Assistant Professor of Interventional Radiology at Patras University Hospital in Rion, Greece. “More specifically, an estimated 1 percent of the worldwide population over 50 years old suffers from CLI.”

Karnabatidis’ study involved 103 people, three quarters of them diabetics. A normal stent was placed in an artery in 41 participants and 62 participants were given drug-eluting stents that were coated with the immunosuppressant, sirolimus.

After three years, the researchers found that the people with the drug-eluting stents had more open arteries (higher primary patency) and less renarrowing (binary restenosis). They were less likely to need a repeat procedure, as is typically the case for people with atherosclerotic disease, who must often undergo multiple surgical procedures to repair renarrowed arteries at the site of angioplasty or stenting, said the researchers.

“Our main finding was that in the below-the-knee region, sirolimus-eluting [stents] have better results than simple stents for CLI treatment in the long term,” Karnabatidis said. “Specifically, drug-eluting demonstrated encouraging three-year results compared with simple stents regarding all the predefined angiographic endpoints and the reintervention-free survival clinical endpoint.”

Source: news.yahoo.com

Tags: drug-eluting stents, Patras University Hospital