A study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, compared drug-eluting bioresorbable vascular scaffolds with drug-eluting metallic stents in percutaneous coronary interventions.
Abbott Vascular, a division of Chicago-based Abbott, funded the study.
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Researchers randomly assigned 1,845 PCI patients to receive either a bioresorbable vascular scaffold (924 patients) or a metallic stent (921 patients). The primary end point was target-vessel failure, which is a "composite of cardiac death, target-vessel myocardial infarction or target-vessel revascularization," the study notes.
At the two-year follow-up, 105 patients in the scaffold group and 94 patients in the stent group had suffered target-vessel failure.
Eighteen patients in the scaffold group and 23 patients in the stent group died due to cardiac arrest, while 48 patients in the scaffold group and 30 patients in the stent group suffered from target-vessel myocardial infarction. Seventy-six patients in the scaffold group underwent target-vessel revascularization, as compared to 65 patients in the stent group.
In the scaffold group, 31 patients suffered from definite or probable device thrombosis, as compared with eight patients in the stent group.
While there was no significant difference in the rate of target-vessel failure between the patients who received a bioresorbable scaffold and those who received a metallic stent, the bioresorbable scaffold group experienced a higher incidence of device thrombosis than the metallic stent group.