What type of stent did Bill Clinton receive?
February 12, 2010
Bill Clinton underwent a PCI procedure yesterday whereby he received two coronary stents, likely the drug-eluting variety as opposed to bare metal scaffolds. The hospital was part of the Columbia University system and the interventional doctors there are the group behind the TCT conference and the CRF. The stent preferences of those doctors make it highly likely that President Clinton received the Abbott/Boston Scientific Xience stent. Second-hand sources have told The HCC that Xience was the brand, although the actual implanting doctors have not confirmed this, nor should they given medical privacy laws.
Xience is a polymer-based stent like the first generation Cypher and Taxus. The key drug that elutes over time and inhibits restenosis is everolimus. Because of the polymer, these types of stents cause the artery to not properly heal in many cases (i.e. late malaposition or aneurysm), requiring the patient to take lifelong blood thinners like Plavix (clopidogrel). The downside to these anticoagulant drugs are side effects including easy bruising, fatigue, and life-threatening serious bleeding including stroke.
Bare metal stents could have been used as well. The current diameter size offerings of the drug eluting stents are often not large enough to match the vein graft dimensions of restenosed CABG vessels. Charles Bush, MD, interventional cardiologist at the Ohio State University Medical Center, estimated that in their cath labs one third of vein grafts receive bare metal stents.
Cardiac surgery/transplantation, Cardiology/interventional, Ohio State University | apples49 | 
February 12, 2010 10:37 pm
No Comments
No comments yet.
Notice: comments_rss_link is deprecated since version 2.5! Use post_comments_feed_link() instead. in /data/30/1/121/80/1121895/user/1185656/htdocs/wordpress/wp-includes/functions.php on line 3406
RSS feed for comments on this post.
TrackBack URI
