While a growing number of reports offer evidence for the potential of drug eluting stents (DES) in treating atherosclerotic stenosis of the extracranial vertebral artery, their efficacy when compared with bare metal stents (BMS) is uncertain due to the lack of a large prospective randomized trial.
A search strategy using the terms 'stents', 'drug-eluting stents', 'atherosclerosis', 'vertebral artery', and 'vertebrobasilar insufficiency' was employed through Medline. Five studies met the criteria for a comparative meta-analysis. The technical/clinical success, periprocedural complications, target vessel revascularization (TVR), rates of restenosis, recurrent symptoms, and overall survival were compared.
There was no significant difference in the technical success (OR=1.528, p=0.622), clinical success (OR=1.917, p=0.274), and periprocedural complications (OR=0.741, p=0.614) between the two groups. An OR of 0.388 for no restenosis in the BMS to DES arms (p=0.001) indicated a significantly higher restenosis rate in the BMS group relative to the DES group (33.57% vs 15.49%). When compared with the DES group, the BMS group had a significantly higher rate of recurrent symptoms (2.76% vs 11.26%; OR=3.319, p=0.011) and TVR (4.83% vs 19.21%; OR=4.099, p=0.001).
A significantly lower rate of restenosis, recurrent symptoms, and TVR was noted in the DES group compared with the BMS group.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 4. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 26 February 2016.
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#6,713,147
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Outputs from Journal of NeuroInterventional Surgery
#1,259
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#77,612
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Outputs of similar age from Journal of NeuroInterventional Surgery
#5
of 70 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 22,817,213 research outputs across all sources so far. This one has received more attention than most of these and is in the 70th percentile.
So far Altmetric has tracked 2,349 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 10.3. This one is in the 46th percentile – i.e., 46% of its peers scored the same or lower than it.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 70 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 91% of its contemporaries.
