A news study in the Sept. 25 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine gives more hope to heart attack patients. Led by Dr. Laura Mauri, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and an interventional cardiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital, the study found that drug-coated stents are more effective than the bare metal kind for people suffering a heart attack.

Stents are small tubes inserted on blood vessels for preventing new blockages. More exactly, they hold the arteries open thus allowing the heart to pomp enough blood. There are two types of stents: one made of metal, which is widely used; there are also stents that can be coated with small amounts of drugs that are released over time to help keep the arteries from being blocked again. They are called drug-eluting stents. According to Dr. Mauri’s study, these stents were actually associated with better survival and fewer repeat procedures. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved coated stents in 2003.

The study involved 7,217 heart attack victims in Massachusetts. They all followed surgeries for stents in 2003 and 2004: 4,016 received drug-coated stents while 3,201 received bare-metal stents. The patients were followed for two years. The researchers found that 8.5 percent of the patients with drug-coated stents died compared to 11.6 percent of the patients with bare-metal stents. Also the patients with drug-coated patient had lower chance of developing a second heart attack. More exactly, second heart attacks struck 7.4 percent of the coated stent patients and 8.5 percent of those receiving bare-metal stents. In addition to these findings, new artery-opening procedures were required for 10.7 percent of the drug-coated recipients compared to 14.9 percent of the other patients.

This is not the first time, drug-coated stents prove more effective in study compared to bare-metal ones. In May, a group of researchers led by Dr. Peter W. Groeneveld, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, reported similar results after analyzing Medicare data on 72,000 stent recipients.

Sales of drug-coated stents have decreased following a Danish study, which linked them to the development of potentially fatal blood clots, but the new study shows the stents are in fact beneficial for heart attack patients, Dr. Mauri said. However, more study is needed to prove whether one stent really saves more lives than the other.

The findings of the study are expected to be released at the American Heart Association meeting in November. The Massachusetts Department of Public Health funded the study.

On Thursday, Boston Scientific Corp won US regulatory approval for its Taxus Express2 Atom Paclitaxel-Eluting Coronary Stent System, the only drug-eluting stent on the US market for use in vessels as small as 2.25 mm in diameter.