Bioresorbable scaffolds offer potential advantages over permanent metallic stents by avoiding long-term vessel distortion and late thrombosis, though their use remains largely restricted to clinical trials.
Cautions against routine use outside trials; leaves open the need for definitive RCTs on long-term safety.
Despite improvements in stent platform, polymer, and drug elution, the permanent metallic stents have significant limitations as they distort vessel physiology, predispose to late thrombosis, and may preclude surgical revascularisation. Bioresorbable scaffold (BRS) technology has evolved over the last few years to overcome these drawbacks. Actually, different BRS are either available or under clinical and preclinical investigation. However, the use of BRS has largely been restricted to patients recruited into clinical trials with a relatively small number of ‘real-world’ patients treated with these devices. Here, we highlight the potentialities of these devices, describe the evidence from the recent clinical trials, and discuss the potential advantages as well as challenges that this novel technology may face in routine clinical practice.
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Ielasi et al. (2014) studied this question.
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