ABSTRACT
Because approximately 4 million patients each year are admitted to hospitals worldwide with unstable angina or acute myocardial infarction (MI), and nearly 1 million patients annually worldwide undergo percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), physicians have focused a great deal of attention on developing new treatments for these acute coronary syndromes (ACS). The initiating event of these acute coronary syndromes is rupture of an atherosclerotic plaque followed by local thrombosis. Similar pathophysiology is present during PCI, which is essentially a "planned" plaque disruption.
