Of Stents and Scaffolds

An innovative approach to the comparison of different percutaneous coronary intervention devices is to deploy them in different arteries within the same individual, thereby removing the confounding influence of patient-related factors on outcomes (Figure).1–4 Preferably, the influence of lesion-related factors would be minimized by randomly allocating individual lesions to one or other treatment.Figure. The influence of patient-related factors on outcomes after percutaneous coronary intervention when comparing different devices can be avoided with an intraindividual comparison. The effect of lesion-related factors can be mitigated by randomization.See Article by Cassese et al In this issue of Circulation: Cardiovascular Interventions , Cassese et al5 report an intraindividual comparison of the performance of everolimus-eluting bioresorbable vascular scaffolds (BVS) versus durable metallic everolimus-eluting stents (DES) in the same individual but in different arteries. The 90 patients undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention to 239 lesions were assigned, at operator discretion, to receive a BVS (n=112) or DES (n=127). The primary end point of in-device late lumen loss at 6 months of angiographic follow-up was …