February 12th, 2010
Stents in the News
Larry Husten, PHD
Bill Clinton’s stent procedure received enormous amounts of attention in the news. Some of the reports even contained various doses of truthful information, though many were riddled with inaccuracies and misperceptions. According to reliable accounts, Clinton had a closed vein graft and received two Xience stents in his left circumflex artery at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York. Mark Apfelbaum and Michael Collins implanted the stents. Allan Schwartz, the hospital’s chief of cardiology , said Clinton was walking two hours after the procedure. Clinton went home Friday morning.By sheer coincidence, stents were the subject of a long and thoughtful feature story by Keith Winstein in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal. Winstein explored the reasons why COURAGE didn’t have as big an impact on clinical practice as was initially hoped (or feared). The article quotes a number of well known cardiologists on all sides of the controversy, including William Boden, Sanjay Kaul, Eric Topol, Donald Baim, and Ajay Kirtane.
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