Nine-year clinical outcomes of drug-eluting stents vs. bare metal stents for large coronary vessel lesions

OBJECTIVES: To evaluate the very long-term safety and effectiveness of drug-eluting stents (DES) compared to bare-metal stents (BMS) for patients with large coronary vessels. METHODS: From April 2004 to October 2006, 2407 consecutive patients undergoing de novo lesion percutaneous coronary intervention with reference vessel diameter greater than or equal to 3.5 mm at Fu Wai Hospital in Beijing, China, were prospectively enrolled into this study. We obtained 9-year clinical outcomes including death, myocardial infarction (MI), thrombosis, target lesion revascularization (TLR), target vessel revascularization (TVR), and major adverse cardiac events (MACE, the composite of death, MI, and TVR). We performed Cox's proportional-hazards models to assess relative risks of all the outcome measures after propensity match. RESULTS: After propensity scoring, 514 DES-treated patients were matched to 514 BMS-treated patients. The patients treated with BMS were associated with higher risk of TLR (HR: 2.55, 95%CI: 1.520–4.277, P = 0.0004) and TVR (HR: 1.889, 95%CI: 1.185–3.011, P = 0.0075), but the rates of death/MI and MACE were not statistically different. All Academic Research Consortium definition stent thrombosis at 9-year were comparable in the two groups. CONCLUSIONS: During long-term follow-up through nine years, use of DES in patients with large coronary arteries was still associated with significant reductions in the risks of TLR and TVR.