What to know about interventional therapy for patients with coronary artery disease: rumors about stents

Coronary heart disease (CHD) is now a very common disease of the elderly, and everyone is at risk. However, no diagnosis of coronary artery disease can be made without a coronary angiogram or coronary CT. The root cause of coronary heart disease is a blockage in the coronary arteries, and there are only two ways to treat this blockage with immediate effect. One is coronary artery bypass surgery, which bypasses the blockage. This is called “what you can’t afford to do, you can’t afford to avoid”. The other method is interventional therapy, coronary stenting. There are many rumors about stents. Rumor #1: “The stent is falling down. The rumor is very graphic and I admire the imagination of the rumor maker. The source of the rumor: In the past bare stent era, about 10-20% of patients had stent restenosis, in which hyperplastic epithelial tissue, smooth muscle tissue, etc. appeared in the stent in the postoperative period of 3-6 months and re-blocked the stent. It should be noted that the stent never falls down, it is the post-stent tissue that is not repaired properly, and there is “over-repair”. Just like the construction, stent is the wall reinforcement, indoor decoration, the doctor put the wall reinforcement, scraping is the individual automatic behavior, scraping good or bad, all depends on their own control, as if “the master led into the door, the practice in the individual”. Now, the invention of drug-coated stent, strict management of excessive repair of the tissue, this stent restenosis incidence can be controlled within 5%, the rumor is not broken. Rumor 2: “You won’t live 5-6 years after stenting”. The source of the rumor: the patients who put the stent are the real patients with coronary heart disease, the stent can cure for a while, but can not cure for a lifetime. Coronary heart disease is a disease that can not be cured, we should listen to Chairman Mao’s words, “on the long term war”, stent surgery should be seriously long-term drug treatment. Often some patients think that everything is fine after stenting, and after the painful stage, they immediately forget about it, and indulge themselves again, and some of them have new lesions, often very serious, and they are afraid of stenting again, and they delay the treatment. This part is a minority, are not serious about the treatment of patients, patients who are not responsible for themselves and others. Most patients will live happily to the end of their lives after they understand that they have coronary heart disease and need to be treated for a long time. The first elderly person we treated, back in the 80’s, is still alive and well after intervention in his 70’s. Examples like this abound. As long as you follow your doctor’s instructions carefully and have regular follow-up visits every year, you will be able to prevent the disease from recurring.