Editorial Drug-eluting stents: effective and safe for every patient and every lesion?

This editorial refers to ‘TAXUS VI 2 year follow up: randomized comparison of polymer-based paclitaxel-eluting with bare metal stents for treatment of long, complex lesions ’ by E. Grube et al., on page 2578 When Andreas Grüntzig performed the first percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty in 1978, he did not expect that this procedure would become one of the most often performed interventions in medicine worldwide. The Achilles ’ heels of balloon angioplasty were early reocclu-sions and restenosis. However,.60 % of the patients after plain old balloon angioplasty did well without any need for repeat target lesion revascularizations. With the introduc-tion of stents, the procedure became more predictable with respect to early reocclusions and the rate of clinically driven repeat revascularization procedures declined t