Background: Bioresorbable vascular scaffolds (BVS) have become an emerging tool to treat coronary artery disease. However, the current use of BVS is still widely restricted to stable patients and non-complex lesions. In real-world practice patients are far more complex than those with simple type A lesions and the extended use of BVS to complex lesions and high-risk patients needs to be evaluated. Therefore, we sought to investigate the feasibility and performance of BVS in a broad spectrum of patients.
Methods: 106 patients underwent in total 193 BVS implantations. We assessed the device-related (cardiac death, target vessel myocardial infarction, ischemia-driven target lesion revascularization) and patient-related (all-cause death, any reinfarction and any revascularization) composite outcomes.
Results: 90 % of patients (n = 95) had at least one of the following characteristics: >65 years (35 %), ACS (42 %), tortuous vessels (13 %), calcified (17 %) or thrombotic lesions (12 %), lesions defined as AHA type B2/C (42 %), bifurcations (16 %), chronic total occlusions (9 %) or restenosis (14 %). There was no evidence of significant edge dissection, huge thrombus load or incidence of scaffold dislodgement or scaffold disruption in optical coherence tomography pullbacks. Out of 10,157 struts evaluated within 1,117 cross-sections, 302 were classified as malapposed (2.9 %). During a mean follow-up of 147 ± 119 days the rate of device-related events was 2.0 %, whereas patient-related composite events occurred in 6.1 %.
Conclusions: Our results strongly suggest that BVS implantation is feasible in a wide spectrum of patients and complex anatomy of coronary lesions. Long-term outcome of BVS should be further investigated in unrestricted settings in randomized controlled trials.