One-Year Clinical Outcome of a Randomized Trial of Polymer-Free Paclitaxel-Eluting Stents Versus Biodegradable Polymer-Based Rapamycin-Eluting Stents in Patients with Coronary Heart Disease

Background: More widespread use of drug-eluting stents (DES) to treat coronary heart disease (CHD) has recently generated more attention to thrombosis, which was relative to the polymer. Polymer-free and biodegradable polymer-based stents are more frequently studied, but their efficacy on preventing detrimental clinical events is unclear. Methods and Results: To assess whether polymer-free paclitaxel-eluting stent (YINYI stent) was noninferior or equivalent to biodegradable polymer-based rapamycin-eluting stents (EXCEL stent) in preventing detrimental clinical cardiovascular events, a total of 167 consecutive CHD patients requiring DES implantation were randomly divided into the YINYI group (n = 82) and the EXCEL group (n = 85). The primary end-point was major adverse cardiac events (MACE). The secondary end-points included stent thrombosis events, all-cause mortality, and rehospitalization. The study was designed to test the noninferiority or equivalence of the YINYI stent compared with the EXCEL stent with respect to one-year MACE according to a noninferiority or equivalence margin of 0.1. One-year MACE was 6.10% in the YINYI group versus 5.88% in the EXCEL group. The lower limit of the one-sided 95% confidence interval was -0.0582 (P = 0.002 from the test for noninferiority). The 95% confidence interval for the equivalence test was [-0.0698, 0.0742] (P1=0.004 and P2=0.007 from 2 times the 1-sided test for equivalence). There was no statistically significant difference in thrombosis events, all-cause death, and rehospitalization (all P > 0.05). Conclusions: In this small randomized trial, polymer-free paclitaxel-eluting stents appear to be noninferior or equivalent to biodegradable polymer-based rapamycin-eluting stents. (J Interven Cardiol 2012;25:604610)