Panel weighs risk of drug-coated heart stents
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GAITHERSBURG, Maryland  - A U.S. advisory panel heard evidence on Thursday about risks of drug-coated stents, the tiny mesh tubes used to prop open arteries in millions of heart patients.
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Patients given drug-coated stents after an acute heart attack are nearly 5 percent more likely to die a year or more later than those with bare metal forms of the arterial scaffolding, new research showed on Tuesday.
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Vioxx . Ritalin. Drug-eluting stents . Those popular drugs and medical devices are on a growing list of therapies used by millions of people that have shown up on the radar of Dr. Steven E. Nissen , a prominent heart specialist.
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Experts expressed concerns Sunday that drug-coated heart stents &#151; metal-mesh tubes used to prop open coronary arteries &#151; may in rare instances lead to potentially fatal blood clots.
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Coronary stents don&#39;t improve the long-term survival rates of heart patients, a Duke University Medical Center study contends.
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Cleveland Clinic cardiologist Eric Topol was one of the first to point out the potential heart risk of Merck&#39;s (nyse: MRK - news - people ) withdrawn Vioxx and Pfizer&#39;s (nyse: PFE - news - people ) Celebrex.
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Drug-releasing stents used widely to keep clogged heart arteries open may increase the risk of potentially dangerous blood clots, but there is no conclusive evidence that the devices boost the likelihood of having a heart attack or dying if used as recommended, an expert panel said yesterday.
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WASHINGTON - A little-known Food and Drug program is testing the latest medical technology to determine how safe and useful it can be.    One cutting-edge experiment is designed to see if injecting certain drugs directly into diseased arteries works better than commonly used stents in keeping arteries clear...
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Patients who get the leading drug-coated stents to prop open coronary arteries rather than bare-metal stents run no higher risk of death, according to a new report by a multinational team of doctors.
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Britain's medicines advisory agency is now planning to publish its latest recommendations on the cost-effectiveness of drug-coated stents late next week, in a decision that could draw fire from manufacturers.
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Blood clotting is four to five times more likely in patients getting drug-coated heart devices known as stents, compared to the older bare-metal variety, according to a large data analysis released on Wednesday.
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A Food and Drug Administration panel tomorrow will consider one of the most urgent questions in medicine: what to do about the risk of blood clots caused by drug-coated stents, tiny medical devices implanted in the arteries of millions of people.
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Johnson &amp; Johnson's drug-coated Cypher heart stent may be better than Boston Scientific's Taxus for repeat procedures to unclog some arteries, according to a study in the Jan. 12 Journal of the American Medical Association.
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Even some heart attack patients would be better off if their doctors avoided using drug-coated stents to open their clogged arteries, an international study found, raising new concerns about the devices.
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Bypass surgery remains the best option for heart patients with more than one clogged artery, according to the first big study to compare bypasses with drug-coated stents. In the study, heart attack and death rates were lower among people who had surgery than those given artery-opening balloon angioplasty and stents. It is latest setback for drug-coated stents, which have revolutionized heart care and have been implanted in about six million people worldwide. The study is in Thursdayâs New England Journal of Medicine.
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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is planning to release new testing requirements for drug-coated heart stents in the next few weeks, the regulatory agency's device chief, Daniel Schultz, told the Wall Street Journal.
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Patients given drug-coated stents after an acute heart attack are nearly five times more likely to die six months to two years later than those with bare metal forms of the arterial scaffolding, research showed on Tuesday.