FRIDAY, Aug. 17 (HealthDay News) -- Cardiac patients who take celecoxib before and six months after implantation of a paclitaxel-eluting stent are less likely to develop restenosis than other patients, researchers report in the Aug. 18 issue of The Lancet.
Bon-Kwon Koo, M.D., of Seoul National University Hospital in South Korea, and colleagues studied 274 coronary artery disease patients, including 136 randomly assigned to take 400 milligrams celecoxib before stent implantation plus 200 mg twice-a-day for six months afterwards. All participants took 75 mg of clopidogrel and 100 mg of aspirin daily.
The researchers found that celecoxib patients experienced less in-stent luminal loss (mean, 0.49 mm) than the others (0.75 mm), and were less likely to require revascularization due to restenosis.
"These data suggest that the adjunctive use of celecoxib for six months after stent implantation in patients with coronary artery disease is safe and can reduce the need for revascularization of the target lesion," the authors write.
The study "underscores that systemic therapy might still have a role in prevention of restenosis, even in the era of drug-eluting stents," according to an editorial by Francesco Pelliccia, M.D., of the Ospedale San Filippo Neri in Rome, Italy, and a colleague.
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