Aims: Although drug-eluting stents have assumed a dominant role in interventional cardiology, concern has been raised about the potential for long-term adverse outcomes, including death. The aim of the present study was to compare the incidence and cause of death between patients who received sirolimus-eluting or bare metal stents.
Methods and results: An integrated analysis was performed on 1748 patients enrolled in four prospective double-blind trials that randomly assigned patients to receive either a sirolimus-eluting or a bare metal stent for treatment of a single de novo coronary stenosis. During a mean follow-up of 2.6+/-0.6 years, 64 patients (3.7%) died. Total mortality was 3.2% among 870 bare metal stent patients and 4.1% among 878 sirolimus-eluting stent patients (P=0.37); there was no difference in cardiac mortality (1.4 vs. 1.3%; P=0.55) or causes of death between these two groups. The predominant cause of death was non-cardiac. Cardiac death was most frequently assigned owing to unwitnessed death. Death due to acute myocardial infarction, congestive heart failure, and stent thrombosis occurred infrequently.
Conclusion: At a mean follow-up of 2.6 years in percutaneous coronary intervention patients, the predominant cause of death was non-cardiac. There was no significant difference in either the frequency or the cause of death with implantation of either sirolimus-eluting or bare metal stents.