Research In Brief
This article was originally published in The Gray Sheet
Executive Summary
Experience matters with DES: The volume of drug-eluting coronary stent implants performed at a center is inversely related to the rates of myocardial infarction and death for the patients, according to data from the German Cypher Registry to be published in the Aug. 18 issue of Circulation. The analysis includes outcomes from 8,201 patients implanted with Johnson & Johnson/Cordis' Cypher sirolimus-eluting stents at 51 centers in Germany between April 2002 and September 2005. Centers that recruited over 400 sirolimus-eluting stent patients during the study period reported an all-cause mortality rate of 0.3% and a myocardial infarction rate of 0.5%. The death and MI rates for centers with between 150 and 400 Cypher patients were 0.6% and 1.2%, and the death and MI rates for centers with fewer than 150 Cypher patients were 0.7% and 1.7%