Drug-eluting stents versus coronary artery bypass grafting for left-main coronary artery disease

A Case Summary of the Application of a Drug-Eluting Stent Combined with a Drug-Coated Balloon in Left Main Coronary Artery Disease

Objective: To evaluate the clinical efficacy of a drug-eluting stent (DES) combined with a drug-coated balloon (DCB)in the treatment of left main coronary artery bifurcation lesions.Methods: A retrospective analysis was conducted on the clinical data of eight patients with left main coronary arterybifurcation lesions treated with a DES combined with a DCB who were admitted to our hospital from July 2016 to July2017. These eight patients all underwent DES treatment for their left main coronary artery and left anterior descendingcoronary artery lesions, and DCB treatment at the ostium of the left circumflex artery; six of the patients underwentsurgical procedures under the guidance of intravascular ultrasonography. Immediate postoperative angiography wasused to evaluate the patency of the diseased vessels, and the restenosis rate at the 6-month follow-up after the operationand the incidence of serious clinical events within 6 months were assessed as well.Results: The use of a DES combined with a DCB in the treatment of left main coronary artery bifurcation lesions hada low restenosis rate (left main coronary artery (8.4 ± 5.3)%, left anterior descending coronary artery (18.2 ± 5.0)%,left circumflex artery (30.5 ± 16.5)%). No serious clinical events occurred in any patients.Conclusion: A DES combined with a DCB is a safe and effective interventional treatment for left main artery coronarybifurcation lesions.

Cardiac surgery 2017 reviewed

For the year 2017, more than 21,000 published references can be found in PubMed when entering the search term "cardiac surgery". This review focusses on conventional cardiac surgery, considering the new interventional techniques only if they were directly compared to classic techniques but also entails aspects of perioperative intensive care management. The publications last year provided a plethora of new and interesting information that helped to quantify classic surgical treatment effects and provided new guidelines for the management of structural heart disease, which made comparisons to interventional techniques easier. The field of coronary bypass surgery was primarily filled with confirmatory evidence for the beneficial role of coronary artery bypass grafting for complex coronary disease and equal outcomes for percutaneous coronary intervention for less complex disease including main stem lesions. For aortic valve treatment, the new guidelines provide an equal recommendation for surgical and transcatheter aortic valve replacement for high and intermediate risk giving specific check lists to individualize decision-making by the heart team. For low-risk aortic stenosis, surgical valve replacement remains the primary indication. For the mitral valve, the importance of surgical experience of the individual surgeon on short- and long-term outcome was presented and the prognostic impact of mitral repair for primary mitral regurgitation was emphasized. In addition, there were many relevant and interesting other contributions from the purely operative arena in the fields of tricuspid disease as well as terminal heart failure (i.e., transplantation and ventricular assist devices). While this article attempts to summarize the most pertinent publications, it does not have the expectation of being complete and cannot be free of individual interpretation. As in recent years, it provides a condensed summary that is intended to give the reader "solid ground" for up-to-date decision-making in cardiac surgery.