A Food and Drug Administration panel will meet on the issue to insure the safety of popular heart stent on Thursday and Friday. Medical journals are rushing studies into print, and powerful doctor groups are reconsidering treatment guidelines.
According to a Cleveland Clinic-led meta-analysis appearing in the December issue of the American Journal of Medicine, there is as much as a four- to five-fold increased relative risk for late thrombosis, or blood clot formation, in patients with drug-eluting stents compared to those with bare-metal stents. This is the first published analysis of its kind.
It is known to cardiologists that the benefit of having a drug-eluting stent is tremendous. Now their long-term safety is in question.