Progress You Can See!

Cardiovascular disease is America’s number one killer. It is also the costliest disease in terms of annual medical expenses, with $257.6 billion in direct costs, and $145.5 billion in indirect costs, or costs due to lost productivity and increased disability. Nearly 2,500 Americans die of cardiovascular disease every day.¹
However, advances in cardiovascular disease treatment have revolutionized medical care and helped to save the lives of millions of people. In fact, mortality from heart disease has plummeted almost 50 percent in the past 20 years.²
One of the advances in treatment is the use of stents — tiny, mesh-like tubes — that are moved to the blocked vessel via a catheter which is threaded up through a leg artery to the heart. Approximately one million coronary stents are implanted every year worldwide.³
Stents treat the severe blockages that often lead to heart attacks, improving the blood flow to damaged hearts. Prior to the advent of stent technology, procedures to restore blood flow in the arteries of the heart involved dangerous open-heart procedure called a coronary artery bypass graft (CABG). Drug-eluting stents, which have a thin coating of medicine on the strong and flexible stent wire scaffold, help protect patients from a re-blockage of a treated coronary artery, which occurs in as many as 15-20 percent of patients who receive a non-coated stent.⁴
Stents provide a less invasive, safer and more reliable treatment and contribute to the patient’s quick recovery when compared to expensive and lengthy open surgical procedures. Research has shown that drug-eluting stent procedures cost several thousand dollars less than CABG surgery. In one analysis, the initial cost of stent implantation, including hospitalization, physician fees and repeat procedures, was 29 percent less than bypass surgery. Medical costs more than a year after the stent procedure, when adjusted for patient differences in extent of coronary artery disease and diabetes, were 21 percent less.⁵

American Heart Association. “Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics-2006 Update.” http://www.americanheart.org/downloadable/heart/1136308648540
Statupdate2006.pdf (22 May 2006).
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National Center for Health Statistics. “Death Rate Due to Heart Attack.” http://www.cdc.gov/nchs (21 May 2006).
Mahdi N, Pathan A, Harrell L, et al. “Directional coronary atherectomy for the treatment of Palmaz-Schatz in-stent restenosis.” American Journal of Cardiology 82 (1998):1345-51.
The Cleveland Clinic. “Statistics on the occurrence of restenosis: new innovations in interventional procedures-restenosis rates reduced.” http://www.clevelandclinic.org/heartcenter/pub/history/future/intervention.asp?firstCat=56&secondCat=57&thirdCat=481 (11 April 2006).
Gruberg L. “ARTS II: Arterial Revascularization Therapies Study Part II — Sirolimus-Eluting Stents vs. PCI and CABG at 1 Year.” Presented at the American College of Cardiology 2005 Annual Scientific Session. http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/501424 (12 April 2006).