Prairie Heart Executive Director to serve on National Task Force for drug eluding stents

SPRINGFIELD -- Jim Zito, executive director of Prairie Heart Institute at St. Johns Hospital in Springfield, Illinois has accepted a seat on a national multidisciplinary task force on drug-eluting stents. This task force was created by The Society for Cardiac Angiography and Interventions and is a branch of the American College of Cardiology. It will meet at multiple locations in the United States and deliver its recommendations within six months.

The task force will be looking at the financial and medicolegal consequences of this new device and make recommendations in these areas to its membership internationally.

Prairie Heart Institute at St. John's Hospital was one of a handful of sites around the country that was heavily involved in the research for the first drug-eluting stent approved by the FDA. It was approved earlier this month. Prairie Heart Institute is also involved in other research involving new drug-eluting stents now being developed.

Drug-eluting stents are used in angioplasty. More than a million Americans a year undergo angioplasty, where doctors pull tiny balloons through clogged heart arteries. The balloons are then inflated to briefly open the arteries to allow blood flow. In recent years, doctors have implanted tiny wire latticed coils, called bare-metal stents, to keep arteries open. However, although the stent stays in place permanently, in about one-fourth of all cases, scar-like tissue fills the artery and the artery closes again. A repeat angioplasty or coronary bypass is needed. But now, a new kind of stent coated with medicines that release into the artery keep cells from growing, thus keeping the artery open longer.

It is estimated that drug-eluting stents could reduce the number of bypass surgeries and repeat angioplasties by 20-30 percent. Also, drug-eluting stents will most likely lower the price of caring for patients with heart disease over time. These new devices will reduce risks as well, particularly for certain patients such as the elderly, people with diabetes and women.

Drug-eluting stents will reduce risks, particularly for certain patients: the elderly, people with diabetes and women, who have a higher mortality rate during surgery and who have more extensive disease than men when they are diagnosed with cardiovascular disease.