Let’s look at how Joan’s drug-eluting stent is deployed.
A stent is a short, wire-mesh tube that acts like a scaffold to help keep your artery open. There are two main types of stent:
- bare metal (uncoated) stent: the biggest drawback of using bare metal stents is that, in around 30% of cases, the arteries begin to narrow again. This is because the immune system sees the stent as a foreign body and attacks it, causing swelling and excessive tissue growth around the stent.
- drug-eluting stent, which is coated with medication that reduces the risk of the artery becoming blocked again and reduces the problems above, These are coated with medication that reduces the body’s abnormal response and tissue growth. Once the stent is in place, the medication is released over time into the area that is most likely to become blocked again.
Reference: NHS Inform – Health information you can trust
The use of drug-eluting stents has reduced the rate of arteries re-narrowing from around 30% to below 10%. However, as drug-eluting stents are still a relatively new technology, it is uncertain how effective or safe they are in the long term.
Before the procedure the cardiologist will consider the benefits and risks of each type of stent for that particular patient.
If the cardiologist is going to consider a stent, they will also require to consider certain anti-platelet drugs to help reduce the risk of blood clots forming around the stent.
Page last reviewed: 10 Jun 2020
