Long-term outcomes of bifurcation lesions after implantation of drug-eluting Stents with the "mini-crush technique"

Objectives: To evaluate clinical and angiographic long-term outcome of "the mini-crush' technique for treating bifurcation lesions. Background: Despite proven efficacy of drug-eluting stent (DES) within most lesions subsets, bifurcation lesions continue to exhibit high restenosis rate using current DES stenting technique. Methods: We report a new stenting technique which was employed in 45 consecutive patients (52 lesions) between April 2004 and July 2005 to treat true bifurcation lesions using DES in both branches. Results: Using this technique procedural success was obtained in 100% of cases, without complications and with excellent angiographic result in 96.1% and 98.1% of main vessel and side branch. Preprocedure reference vessel diameter and minimal lumen diameter (MLD) were 2.68 +/- 0.48 and 0.90 +/- 0.55 mm for the main branch, respectively and 2.28 +/- 0.34 and 1.14 +/- 0.47 mm for the side branch, respectively. Postprocedure MLD was 2.56 +/- 0.39 mm for the main branch and 2.16 +/- 0.29 mm for the side branch. There were no in-hospital major adverse cardiac events (MACE). At 72 days after procedure there was one case of side branch stent thrombosis (2.2%), which resulted in non Q-wave MI. Angiographic follow up was obtained in 100% of patients at 7.5 +/- 1.3 months. Target lesion revascularization (TLR) was 12.2%; no death and Q-wave MI were observed; reference vessel diameter and MLD for the main branch were 2.79 +/- 0.51 and 1.99 +/- 0.65 mm respectively and for the side branch 2.28 +/- 0.40 and 1.63 +/- 0.48 mm respectively. Restenosis rate in the main branch was 12.2% while in the side branch was 2.0%. Conclusions: In-hospital outcome indicates that the mini-crush technique for bifurcation lesions with DES can be easily performed. It provides very low total MACE rate and restenosis at 8-month follow-up. These results confirmed the advantage of this specific technique to give complete coverage of the ostium of the side branch using two stents technique. (C) 2007 Wiley-Liss, Inc.