ABSTRACT
Introduction The introduction of coronary stenting has changed the approach to the percutaneous treatment of coronary artery disease. In most interventional centres, stents are used in over 50% of all coronary angioplasty procedures.1 The main reasons for this expansion are firstly that stents can now be implanted without the need for systemic anticoagulation, secondly they have made angioplasty safer, with a sharp decline in the need for emergency bypass surgery, in particular since the availability of new generation stents and finally they have resulted in a significant decrease in restenosis rates.
Indications for stenting Coronary stenting, which achieves a greater acute gain and provides effective lumen scaffolding, is associated with better short-and long-term outcomes in lesions within large native coronary arteries.2,3 The positive results of a few randomized trials have been enthusiastically applied to almost every other patient and lesion subcategory. However, these favourable results do not apply to all coronary lesions treated with catheter-based interventions in daily practice.4 For long lesions,5 small vessels,6,7 chronic total occlusions8,9 ostial10,11
