 | | | | Related Healthscout Videos | |
|
Page: << Prev | 1 | 2 As a bonus, the patients did not require treatment with clot-dissolving drugs such as Plavix and aspirin -- medicines that are typically needed with today's permanent metal stents.
The magnesium devices were far from perfect, however. Re-blockage of an artery occurred in 47.5 percent of patients, with 27 percent of them requiring artery-opening procedures.
One unexpected benefit of the magnesium stents was that it allowed the cardiologists to see what was happening inside the devices by using either MRI or CT scans. "Such views are hard to get with current devices, but we could get a wonderful visualization of an artery," Erbel said.
Text Continues Below
He views magnesium as a natural material for a degradable stent, because it is easily handled by the body. "After four months, everything is gone," Erbel said. "In fact, the degradation process was, in our opinion, too rapid, something we are researching," he said.
Joachim Kohn, director of the New Jersey Center for Biomaterials at Rutgers University, disagreed that biodegradable magnesium stents are the wave of the future.
"I'm familiar with this and don't think it will work very well, in spite of the early positive results," Kohn said. "We are going to see a number of complications in the end stages of the degradation of magnesium. It is a revolutionary and very innovative idea, but, in the end, we are better off with a body-like material than with a metal."
Kohn has developed a stent that uses just such a synthetic "biomaterial." It has been licensed to a small company, REVA Medical, with first human tests scheduled to begin this month.
Almost all the degradable stents now under development use such synthetic materials, which helps explain why so little is being done in the United States, Kohn said.
"Biomaterials were hot in the 1990s," he said. "Everyone in the United States was interested in biomaterials. But a field has to be matured, and before that happened, we moved on to other things, such as nanomaterials."
Wherever the work is done, "there is no question that we will want a biodegradable stent eventually," Kohn said. "There are persistent issues with permanent stents." It will take years to get such stents into routine medical use, he said, because careful human testing will be required.
More information
For more on stents, visit the American Heart Association.
Page: << Prev | 1 | 2
|
.gif)
