Reduced systemic inflammatory response to implantation of sirolimus-eluting stents in patients with stable coronary artery disease

Stent implantation causes significant injury to the vascular wall, resulting in inflammatory activation. Although sirolimus-eluting stents (SES) have anti-inflammatory properties, their effect on periprocedural systemic inflammatory response has not been sufficiently investigated. Eighty-one patients with stable coronary artery disease involving severe stenosis of one major epicardial coronary artery underwent coronary angioplasty with stent implantation and randomly received either SES or bare metal stents (BMS). Blood samples were taken 24 h before, at 24 h, 48 h and 1 month after the angioplasty and levels of high sensitive C-reactive protein (hsCRP), interleukin-6 (IL-6), interleukin-1β (IL-1β), and monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1) were determined. HsCRP after BMS implantation increased over 24 h (p < 0.001) and then remained steady, as did IL-6 and IL-1β similarly. In contrast, their levels in SES patients decreased to below baseline by the end of the month. MCP-1 levels increased by the end of 1 month (p < 0.001) in the BMS group, whereas in SES they steadily decreased, becoming significantly lower than baseline from 48 h (p = 0.015). In conclusion, patients with SES exhibit an attenuation of the postprocedural systemic inflammatory activation during a 1-month follow-up after stent implantation. This might partially explain the reduced restenosis rate associated with SES.