Risks
Like all invasive medical procedures, implanting stents in the coronary arteries carries risk. For the newer drug-eluting stents, very-long-term results are not yet available; however, five-years after implantation sirolimus-eluting stents remained superior to bare-metal stents.
Risks associated with cardiac catheterization procedures include bleeding, allergic reaction to the X-ray contrast agents used to visualize the coronary arteries, and myocardial infarction. With PCI, the requirement for emergency CABG has markedly decreased since the days of balloon angioplasty, such that in some communities, coronary stenting is permitted in hospitals without on-site cardiac surgery facilities, though this remains highly controversial in the United States, not least because of the rare but largely unpredictable risk of coronary artery perforation. Rarely, a type of allergic reaction to the drug may occur; episodes of fatality have been reported.
Read more about this topic: Drug-eluting Stent
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“There are risks which are not acceptable: the destruction of humanity is one of them.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)