Worsening Clinical Outcome with Increasing Number of So-Called Off-Label or Unapproved Indications for Use of Drug Eluting Stents

Objective: We explored the impact of increasing number of off-label patient and lesion character-istics on 5-year clinical outcome following implantation of first generation drug eluting stents. Furthermore we tried to assess if stent performance might be improved if the off-label character-istics present were taken into account to guide the stent brand selection. Design: A total of 2888 coronary lesions treated with first generation drug eluting stents were classified for eventual presence of 18 different off-label characteristics and correlated to the 5-year clinical outcome by multiple stepwise Cox regression analysis. Results: The composite of cardiac death, myocardial infarction and target vessel revascularization (major adverse cardiac event, MACE) was 16.7% in cases with zero off-label characteristics and showed a stepwise increased rate up to 32.7% in cases with 5 off-label characteristics. The MACE rate for the sirolimus eluting stent appears to be 10% lower than the paclitaxel stent group and it may be further reduced by 10% - 18% if the off-label characteristics present in each case were taken into account to guide the stent brand selection. Conclusion: With increasing number of concomitantly appearing off-label characteristics there is a stepwise increase in MACE rate. The MACE rate may be reduced if the off-label characteristics were used to guide the stent brand selection.