Drug-eluting stents (DES) have gained widespread adoption being implanted in over 6 million patients worldwide demonstrating significant improvements in clinical efficacy combined with comparable safety to bare metal stents.

The recent European Society of Cardiology (ESC) meeting in Barcelona raised questions about late stent thrombosis and potential increase in late adverse clinical events (death and MI) with drug-eluting stents (DES) as compared to bare-metal stents (BMS).