Long-term clinical outcomes after everolimus- and sirolimus-eluting coronary stent implantation: final 3-year follow-up of the Randomized Evaluation of Sirolimus-Eluting Versus Everolimus-Eluting Stent Trial.

BACKGROUND: Long-term clinical outcomes of everolimus-eluting stent (EES) compared with sirolimus-eluting stent (SES) have not been evaluated fully yet, especially whether EES implantation could positively affect late adverse events reported after SES implantation occurring >1 year.

METHODS AND RESULTS: In this all-comer prospective multicenter randomized open-label trial, 3196 patients were assigned randomly to implant either EES (n=1596) or SES (n=1600). At 3 years, EES was noninferior to SES on the primary safety end point (all-cause death or myocardial infarction; 10.1% versus 11.5%; noninferiority P <0.001; and superiority P=0.19). Cumulative incidence of definite stent thrombosis was low and was not significantly different between the 2 groups (0.5% versus 0.6%; P=0.81). There was no significant difference in the efficacy end point of target-lesion revascularization between the EES and SES groups (6.6% versus 7.9%; P=0.16). However, the cumulative incidence of target-lesion failure (cardiac death/target-vessel myocardial infarction/ischemia-driven target-lesion revascularization) was significantly lower in the EES group than in the SES group (8.8% versus 11.4%; P=0.01). By a landmark analysis at 1 year, the cumulative incidence of very late stent thrombosis and late target-lesion revascularization was not significantly different between the 2 groups (0.2% versus 0.2%; P=0.99 and 2.2% versus 2.9%; P=0.21, respectively).

CONCLUSIONS: The efficacy and safety outcomes for this trial after EES implantation remained comparable with those after SES implantation through 3-year follow-up. However, improvement of clinical outcome after EES implantation compared with SES implantation was suggested by the significantly lower cumulative incidences of target-lesion failure, which has been the most widely used primary end point in the stent-versus-stent trials.

CLINICAL TRIAL REGISTRATION URL: https://www.clinicaltrials.gov. Unique identifier: NCT01035450.