ACUTE AND 30-DAY RESULTS OF THE SERPENTINE BALLOON-EXPANDABLE STENT IMPLANTATION IN SIMPLE AND COMPLEX CORONARY ARTERIAL NARROWINGS

We report the acute and 30-day results with a new serpentine-design, t ubular, stainless steel, balloon-expandable stent (beStent) in the fir st 100 patients. One hundred forty-eight stents were used to treat 103 narrowings in the left anterior descending (n = 46), left circumflex (n = 20), and right coronary (n = 37) arteries. There were 85 de nova and 18 restenotic lesions (lesion length: <10 mm [31], 10 to 20 mm [43 ] >20 mm [29]; lesion type: A [10] B1 [29], B2 [20], C [44]; total occ lusions, 23. More than 1 stent was used in 31 patients for treatment o f long lesions that could not be covered by 1 stent. The stents used w ere 15-mm (n 106), 25-mm (n = 38), or 35-mm (n = 4) long. Stent implan tation strategy involved predilatation, deployment, and high-pressure dilatation, using the same balloon if possible. Clinical in-hospital s uccess was 97% (2 patients had stent thrombosis that was recanalyzed, with myocardial infarction developing in 1, and 1 patient died on day 14 from retroperitoneal bleeding treated with surgery and complicated by sepsis). One-month event-free survival was 96%, with 1 death on day 21 due to hypertensive crisis. There were no other major adverse card iac events in this first complex cohort of patients. In conclusion, th e initial experience with this stent demonstrates its safety and effic iency for treating simple and complex coronary disease, with a relativ ely low rate of complications. long-term clinical follow-up awaits fur ther investigation. (C) 1997 by Excerpta Medica, Inc.