San Francisco — An everolimus-eluting stent with a resorbable scaffold showed superior efficacy in a randomized multicenter trial when compared with angioplasty for the treatment of patients with chronic limb threatening ischemia (CLTI) resulting from infrapopliteal artery disease.
The stent (Esprit BTK, Abbott Vascular) was also noninferior to angioplasty in terms of safety.
Presenting results of the LIFE-BTK trial here at the Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics 2023 congress, Ramon Varcoe, MBBS, MS, PhD, MMed, of Prince of Wales Hospital, Sydney, Australia, said that peripheral artery disease is a global epidemic, the most serious manifestation of which is CTLI.
"If not treated expeditiously, this could lead to high rates of amputation, which as we all know, has a severe impact on patients' quality of life, and even worse impact on their life prognosis, with prognosis rates worse than most cancers."
He said that for infrapopliteal or below-the-knee (BTK) arterial disease, treatment with angioplasty has proven superior to bypass graft surgery, but some limitations of angioplasty are elastic recoil, dissection, and restenosis, thus limiting its durability. Coronary drug-eluting stents showed promise in BTK procedures but can interfere with reintervention. Thus, LIFE-BTK compared a drug-eluting stent with resorbable scaffolding to surgery.
Esprit BTK is a drug-eluting resorbable scaffold consisting of a temporary scaffold backbone of poly(L-lactide) and a strut thickness of 99 μm.
