Treatment: Drug-Coated Cardiac Stents Save Costs

Patients with the drug-coated stents were less apt to die, have heart attacks or require extra stents or bypass surgery in the two years following placement of the stent, according to new research from the University of Pennsylvania. 30/05/2008

Drug-coated cardiac stents
save costs.
©Pixelio

“This might be a hidden nugget of goodness that could not be detected in clinical trials,” says Peter W. Groeneveld, MD, MS, assistant professor in Penn’s Division of General Internal Medicine. “There is a distinct possibility that drug-eluting stents not only reduce the need for future cardiac procedures, but also save lives.” Groeneveld and his colleagues studied Medicare data to identify about 72,000 patients who received drug-eluting stents during a nine-month period in 2003, the first year the devices were approved for use in the United States. In a separate study Groeneveld also found that drug-eluting stents also offer cost savings during the first year after placement.

Although the initial cost of the device – averaging $16,000 - outpaces that of a bare metal stent, which costs about $14,000, the Penn researchers found that among patients with the drug-coated stents, 12 percent of those studied needed additional stents placed in the first year, compared to 15 percent of patients who received bare-metal stents.

Few patients in either arm required bypass surgery in the first year following stent placement, but those who received bare-metal stents were twice as likely to need the procedure, leading to an additional cost savings of $714 per patient treated with drug-coated stents. Overall, researchers found that patients with drug-eluting stents each saved an average of $1,350 worth of follow-up care during the year, which projects a total savings of approximately $100 million dollars among the 72,000 drug-eluting stent patients studied.

The researchers note that future studies should focus on how drug therapies including clopidogrel and cholesterol-reducing statin drugs may play a role in outcomes and costs for both types of stent patients.

MEDICA.de; Source: University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine