Drug-releasing heart stents safe for wide use: study

0 Comments | AFP, January, 2008

CHICAGO (AFP) — A major study of the first two commercially available drug-releasing coronary stents has found that both appear to be safe for use in a variety of patients.

Stents are tubes used to keep previously blocked coronary arteries open.

The advent of drug-releasing stents has cut the rate of reblockage in half to about 10 percent, according to background information in the study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

But the stents were approved based on results from relatively small trials and a number of follow up studies were "challenging to interpret," according to an accompanying editorial.

This latest study of 2,098 men and women at five university hospitals in Denmark found that "the rates of serious...