DISSOLVING STENT FOR HEART PASSES MAJOR HURDLE
Anew type of heart stent that works like dissolving stitches— slowly going away after it’s done its job— has passed its first major test in a large study.
The dissolving Absorb stent— made by Abbott Vascular, a division of North Chicago-based Abbott Laboratories— performed as well as a conventional stent in the one-year study, though the fact that it didn’t prove superior led some experts to be wary.
Still, the results on this and other novel stents currently in testing are fueling hope for a new generation of these devices, used on about 850,000 heart patients a year in the United States.
Stents are tiny mesh cages that keep blood vessels from re-clogging after an artery-opening angioplasty procedure. The ones available now in the United States are permanent implants made of metal, usually coated with a material that oozes medicine. But those sometimes cause inflammation and other problems years down the road.
The Absorb stent is already sold in Europe. It’s made of a degradable material designed to stay intact and release medicine for a year, then break down over the next two years.
“It holds the artery open long enough for the artery to heal,” then completely goes away, said one study leader, Dr. Dean Kereiakes of Christ Heart and Vascular Center in Cincinnati.
The study involved about 2,000 patients with chest pain due to one or two clogged arteries. Those treated with the dissolving stent fared as well as those given a conventional Abbott stent called Xience. After one year, 6 percent to 7 percent of both groups had died of a heart-related cause, had a heart attack due to a problem with the treated artery or needed a new artery-opening procedure.
The dissolving stent did not prove better, though, on several measures, and the trends were leaning in the opposite direction, noted Dr. Robert A. Byrne of the Technical University of Munich, who has been a paid speaker for some rival stent and heart device makers.
Byrne wrote a commentary published online with the study by the New England Journal of Medicine.
Abbott sponsored and helped design the study, and several study leaders consult for the company.
Price could be a factor in how widely dissolving stents catch on. Abbott wouldn’t say what Absorb would cost. Others said dissolving stents cost more than conventional ones.