Slight Decrease Seen in Drug-Eluting Stent Usage
Goodroe Healthcare Solutions, a healthcare consulting company based in Norcross, GA, provided statistics to the Boston Globe showing a modest decline in the proportion of drug-coated stents used in heart-repair operations. Goodroe’s numbers are based on roughly 35,000 procedures in 78 hospitals and showed a decline for the first time, from 88 percent to 86 percent in the third quarter. The other 14 percent are done with bare metal stents. At about $800, the later cost about 40% of the more sophisticated drug-coated devices. Several studies have recently questioned the benefits of drug-eluting stents as well as highlighted a potential higher late cloating risk in using them rather than their more basic predecessors.
A Bloomberg article recently presented other anectodal evidence that doctors are reconsidering blanket usage of drug-eluting stents. These devices gained their high adoption rate very quickly after having been approved in 2001 in Europe and 2003 in the U.S. Boston Scientific relied on them to generate more than 40 percent of its sales last year. In its third quarter earnings report today, the company announces that worldwide sales of its Taxus paclitaxel-eluting coronary stent systems were $572 million for the third quarter of 2006 as compared to $601 million for the third quarter of 2005. Boston will release new clinical trial results about Taxus at the eighteenth annual Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT) scientific symposium next week in Washington, DC.
October 18, 2006 Related topics: Medical Devices & Products, Cardiology