Kissing drug-eluting balloons for the treatment of unprotected distal left main bifurcation drug-eluting stent restenosis

Abstract

The advent of drug-eluting stents (DES) associated with improvements in interventional techniques, encouraged the use of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) for unprotected left main (ULM) stenosis because of the lower need of repeat revascularization compared to the bare-metal stents (BMS). Nevertheless, ULM DES in-stent restenosis (ISR) continues to occur. The choice of treatment strategy (medical treatment, repeated PCI, or coronary artery bypass graft) for ULM DES-ISR depends primarily on several clinical and angiographic factors, making optimal patient selection crucial in the appropriate treatment of ULM-ISR lesions and achievement of favorable long-term outcomes. We describe in this report a successful modern approach to manage a distal ULM DES-ISR following a 2-stent strategy, consisting in the kissing inflation of two DEBs in both branches of the bifurcation.