What has been the success rate of the drug-eluting stents?
With the old bare metal stent, the restenosis (renarrowing) rate was about 15-20 percent. With the drug-eluting stent, it is down to less than 5 percent. So essentially, if you put in one of these stents it can keep the artery open forever. What have been some of the biggest challenges? One of the biggest challenges – not only to me but for the entire interventional cardiology community – would be the chronically occluded arteries. Because when an artery is tightly narrowed, there’s still a channel of opening and it’s fairly easy to sneak through a small balloon to open it. But when it’s completely blocked, then you can imagine that it gets to be a lot harder. We encounter these chronically occluded arteries all of the time. In fact, about 30 percent of the time when we go inside and just to take pictures we see these chronically shut down arteries. So for a long time we have been trying to come up with ways to get these open. Some of the cardiologists in Japan have come up with a tech
