Drug-eluting stents can help patients who underwent open heart bypass surgery, according to new data, meaning they need fewer revascularization procedures after their surgeries.
Dr. Julinda Mehilli of the Technische Universität Munich in Germany presented results from a 610-patient, four-center trial at the American College of Cardiology’s annual meeting in New Orleans. The study followed patients with at least one lesion in a previously implanted saphenous vein bypass graft who received either a DES or a bare-metal stent. Patients in the DES group received a paclitaxel-eluting, sirolimus-eluting, or bioabsorbable polymer sirolimus-eluting stent.
Read more coverage of ACC 2011 from MassDevice.com
After a year, the DES cohort had a 35 percent lower incidence of death, heart attack and target lesion revascularization when compared with the BMS group, according to the heartwire (paid) blog.
Abbott touts Xience V data
Abbott Laboratories (NYSE:ABT) touted a pooled analysis of the four clinical trials presented at ACC 2011 it says “reinforces the positive clinical performance” of its Xience V drug-eluting stent over Boston Scientific Corp.’s (NYSE:BSX) Taxus Liberté and Taxus Express2 stents.
The data presented at the meeting, culled from the Spirit II, II, IV and Compare trials of about 7,000 patients show that “predictors of artery re-blockage, cardiac death or heart attack” after two years were significantly lower in the Xience V cohorts, including a 36 percent reduction in the risk of major adverse cardiac events.
Here are some other data points highlighted in the Abbott release:
- A 47 percent reduction in the risk of heart attack (2.9 percent for Xience V versus 5.5 percent for Taxus)
- A 40 percent reduction in the risk of cardiac death or heart attack (4.0 percent for Xience V versus 6.6 percent for Taxus)
- A 36 percent reduction in the risk of ischemia-driven target lesion revascularization (4.1 percent for Xience versus 6.6 percent for Taxus)
- A 70 percent reduction in the risk of stent thrombosis, defined as definite or probable according to the Academic Research Consortium (0.7 percent for Xience V vs. 2.3 percent for Taxus
BSX hopes Ion has the chemistry to succeed
Boston Scientific had some positive data of its own to tout, reporting results from another pooled analysis showing that its next-generation Ion device, a platinum-chromium DES, known as the Taxus Element in the European Union where it’s been on the market since winning CE Mark approval in May 2010 (BSX is planning to launch the stent under the Ion brand in the U.S. “by mid-2011,” according to a press release).
Those data, from a comparison of the Ion/Element stent with the Taxus Liberté stent in the Perseus and Atlas trials involving nearly 2,300 patients, “demonstrated significantly lower rates of major adverse cardiac events, target lesion failure and myocardial infarction” for the Ion/Element cohort:
- Significantly lower rates of MACE (7.5 percent vs. 12.0 percent) and TLF (5.5 percent vs. 8.5 percent)
- A reduction in myocardial infarction (1.8 percent vs. 3.9 percent)
- A numerically lower but not statistically different rate of target vessel revascularization (6.5 percent vs. 8.8 percent)
- Significantly lower late loss at nine months (0.33 plus/minus 0.52 mm vs. 0.42 plus/minus 0.56 mm)
PLC Systems pins its hopes on new RenalGuard data
PLC Systems Inc. (OTC:PLCSF) jumped 26.4 percent to 24 cents per share on positive data from an ACC 2011 presentation showing that its RenalGuard system helped prevent contract-induced nephropathy and dialysis in patients with chronic kidney disease who need catheterization procedures.
Data from the 294-patient Remedial II trial showed that patients treated with RenalGuard and N-acetylcysteine developed at a much lower rate than patients in the control group who were treated with an infusion of sodium bicarbonate and NAC (the standard of care). The RenalGuard group had a CIN incidence rate that was 46 percent lower than the control group. The trial also found that use of the PLC system resulted in a reduced need for dialysis in high-risk patients — 4.8 percent of the control group required dialysis, versus 0.7 percent in the RenalGuard group.
Hurricane Katrina is still a heartbreaker
Four years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, residents of the Big Easy were three times as likely to have a heart attack despite no change in their risk factors for myocardial infarction.
Similar results were reported two years after the disaster, compared with statistics from before the storm hit in August 2005.
Dr. Anand Irimpen of the Heart and Vascular Institute at the Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans said his team’s findings were unexpected.
“The data were surprising for us; we thought we would see a downward trend after another two years. Our findings four years post-Katrina are quite profound. We should pay closer attention to people affected by major disasters in the U.S. and beyond our shores, because the long-term detrimental effects on the health of a community are far-reaching and may even be passed on to the next generation,” Irimpen said.
Irimpen’s single-center, retrospective study compared patients admitted to Tulane Medical Center for heart attack in the two years prior to Hurricane Katrina and patients admitted during the four years after the hospital reopened five months after the gale. Less than one percent of the 21,229 patients admitted pre-Katrina had a heart attack, compared with 2.2 percent of the 29,228 admitted after the storm.
And patients after the disaster were much more likely to lack insurance and not be compliant with their medications, according to Irimpen.
“Many of the patients we see are not yet back to their pre-Katrina residences — they are living in places that they cannot call their own, living with family members or in temporary homes; they have not yet gained employment, and are too stressed to pay attention to ideal health practices,” he noted. “Chronic stress, and how people deal with it — overdoing those things that are detrimental to health (such as smoking, alcohol, substance abuse, overeating, and not yet resuming exercise habits) — appears to play an ongoing role.”
