-- Despite initial concerns that stent thrombosis, a blood clot inside a stent, is more com with the drug-eluting device, there appears to be no difference in the clot risk for either drug-eluting or bare metal stents, a large new study found. "So it's not that high after all." "With any type of bare metal stent or drug-eluting stent, there was no difference after one year," Dangas added. "We had a thrombosis rate of 3.3 percent over a year, which sounds high, but these are patients with acute [heart attacks] getting a stent," lead researcher Dr.

George Dangas, an associate professor of medicine at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City, said during a morning teleconference at the American College of Cardiology's annual scientific sessions in Orlando, Fla. With many of these procedures, the stent, a metallic mesh tube that props open the narro artery, is also inserted and left in place. Bare metal stents -- as the name implies -- are bare tubes of metal mesh. Drug-eluting stents, in addition.

After a heart attack, many patients undergo a treatment called angioplasty, which opens the blocked coronary artery that caused the attack.