ABSTRACT
Considering its minimally invasive nature, endovascular stenting would be expected to consume fewer hospital resources and to require shorter postprocedural hospitalizations. Gray et al. (10) report lower costs and shorter hospitalizations (by 1.5 days) in patients treated with endovascular stenting. In the SAPPHIRE trial, patients subjected to endovascular treatments were discharged about 1 day earlier than patients treated with endarterectomy (26). It is unclear how much these differences were due to medical necessity or simply the treating physician’s preferences, since in no comparative study of the two treatments were the physicians responsible for the patients’ postprocedure management blinded to the patient treatment. Other trials, in fact, show no difference in the length of hospitalization in patients treated with endarterectomy or with endovascular stenting (24,27).
