Abstract
Interventional treatment of coronary disease has made three big leaps in its progress. The first was the beginning of interventional cardiology by development of balloon angioplasty, the second was introduction of stents and the third the use of cytostatics that were eliminated from the polymer matrix of the stents.
All the three steps meant a great progress in the treatment of patients with ischemic heart disease, all of them have come to be used in hundreds of thousands and millions of people worldwide and all of them were accompanied by significant problems at the beginning. In comparison to other interventional cardiological methods these procedures are simple to perform.
Owing to the huge number of patients treated by them an important question arises: How do these interventional methods influence the long-term prognosis?