Received on 07/06/05 • Accepted on 08/22/05

Angioplasty, stents, restenosis, coronary artery bypass surgery. The authors review percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) evolution and its growing application in myocardial revascularization for patients with coronary heart disease in Brazil and worldwide. PCI was introduced in 1977 using only the catheter balloon. Limitations of this method (acute occlusion and coronary restenosis) led to the adoption of coronary stents and more recently the advent of drug-eluting stents2, which were developed to drastically reduce restenosis rates. These developments allowed the exponential growth of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) procedures in Brazil which have replaced many bypass surgery procedures and have become the gold standard for the majority of symptomati