Should we implant a covered stent only when there is no other solution?

In this issue of EuroIntervention, Harnek et al report the “Very long-term outcome of coronary covered stents”. This work, which comes from the SCAAR registry, is the largest study ever published regarding the outcome following implantation of covered stents (CS)1.

The relevant findings of the study are the following:

1) At the time of this evaluation the SCAAR registry included 197,948 patients. Among this population 256 patients were treated with 366 CS. The registry included 320,784 stenting procedures performed between 2005 and 2017. These data mean that 21 patients were treated each year with these devices. To put this another way, we can say that ...