Drug-Eluting Coronary Stents — Promise and Uncertainty

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Abstract
In this issue of the Journal, we publish five Original Articles and two Perspective articles on the subject of drug-eluting coronary stents.1-7 Our motivation is the recent concern that the implantation of drug-eluting stents, as compared with bare-metal stents, may be associated with a small increased risk of late stent thrombosis, a potentially fatal complication ( Figure 1 ). At a meeting of the Circulatory System Devices Advisory Panel of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on December 7 and 8, 2006, presentations were made on virtually every aspect of this complex clinical problem.8 In order to inform the medical community, we are publishing these articles, which are representative of the presentations and discussions that took place at the panel meeting. In some cases we provide two views of the same data sets, because different investigators looked at the same data using different analytic approaches. Readers will see that the details of analysis are critical for understanding the conclusions of each of these reports.