ABC 33/40 - Birmingham News, Weather, SportsTrinity Medical Center First Hospital in Alabama to Use New FDA Approved Stent.

Trinity Medical Center recently became the first hospital in Alabama to use a newly approved medical device to open narrowed coronary arteries, even in heart disease patients with diabetes.  The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently approved this new device – the Resolute Integrity Drug-Eluting Stent (DES) from Medtronic.

The Resolute Integrity DES is the first and only heart stent to be FDA approved for treating patients with coronary artery disease (CAD) who also have diabetes.  Remarkably, the new device has been shown in a global series of clinical studies to yield consistently strong performance in CAD patients with and without diabetes.  Approximately one-third of all patients, an estimated 300,000 people in the United States alone, who receive a stent each year have diabetes.  

"The Resolute Integrity Drug-Eluting Stent represents a significant advance in the interventional treatment of coronary artery disease," says Stephen Bakir, MD, cardiologist on staff at Trinity Medical Center.  "The device's indication for CAD patients with diabetes in particular really distinguishes it from the alternatives."

Research shows that the nearly 26 million people in the United States who have diabetes are at a greater risk for developing CAD, and millions of U.S. patients with both diabetes and CAD face an increased rate of heart attacks an strokes than patients without diabetes.