Acute and 30-day results of the serpentine balloon expandable stent implantation in simple and complex coronary arterial narrowings

We report the acute and 30-day results with a new serpentine-design, tubular, stainless steel, balloon-expandable stent (beStent) in the first 100 patients. One hundred forty-eight stents were used to treat 103 narrowings in the left anterior descending (n = 46), left circumflex (n = 20), and right coronary (n = 37) arteries. There were 85 de novo and 18 restenotic lesions (lesion length: <10 mm [31], 10 to 20 mm [43] > 20 mm [29]; lesion type: A [10] B1 [29], B2 [20], C [44]; total occlusions, 23. More than 1 stent was used in 31 patients fur treatment of long lesions that could not be covered by 1 stent. The stents used were 15-mm (n = 106), 25-mm (n = 38), or 35-mm (n = 4) long. Stent implantation strategy involved predilatation, deployment, and high-pressure dilatation, using the same balloon if possible. Clinical in-hospital success was 97% (2 patients had stent thrombosis that was recanalyzed, with myocardial infarction developing in 1, and 1 patient died on day 14 from retroperitoneal bleeding treated with surgery and complicated by sepsis). One month event-free survival was 96%, with 1 death on day 21 due to hypertensive crisis. There were no other major adverse cardiac events in this first complex cohort of patients. In conclusion, the initial experience with this stent demonstrates its safety and efficiency for treating simple and complex coronary disease, with a relatively low rate of complications. Long-term clinical follow-up awaits further investigation.