[Coronary angioplasty in the real world: the RESTEM registry. Outcome of patients treated with sirolimus-eluting stents].

Background: RESTEM, a prospective multicenter registry collecting all percutaneous coronary interventions made over 20 months and monitored up to 2 years, had been performed to assess, in the real world, the impact of sirolimus-eluting stents (SES) versus bare metal stents (BMS) on patients' outcomes.

Methods: The registry includes 5524 consecutive patients treated with BMS (72%), SES (15%), BMS+SES (4%) or other techniques (9%). The combination of death, acute myocardial infarction, unstable angina and revascularization had been chosen as primary endpoint.

RESTEM: a percutaneous coronary intervention 'real world' registry in the drug-eluting stent era.

Sirolimus-eluting stents (SESs) reduce the rate of in-stent restenosis in selected cases. Their performance in more complex patients and their impact on the final clinical outcome of these patients, however, remains uncertain. RESTEM Registry (REgistro delle PCI in era di STEnt Medicati), a prospective multicenter registry collecting all percutaneous coronary interventions (PCIs) performed over 20 months and monitored up to 2 years, includes 5524 consecutive patients treated with bare metal stent (BMS) (72%), sirolimus-eluting stent (SES) (15%), combined BMS+SES (4%), or other techniques (9%).

Coronary stent implantation is superior to balloon angioplasty for chronic coronary occlusions: six-year clinical follow-up of the GISSOC trial.

Objectives: We investigated whether the benefits of stent implantation over balloon percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA) for treatment of chronic total coronary occlusions (CTO) are maintained in the long term.

Background: Several randomized trials have shown that in CTO, stent implantation confers clinical and angiographic mid-term outcomes superior to those observed after PTCA. However, limited information on the long-term results of either technique is available.