Do doctors use heart stents for acute heart events?

Yes, coronary (heart) artery stents are often used when someone presents to an emergency room having a heart attack. If an acute heart attack is suspected in an individual based on the story and ECG, they are taken directly to the heart catheterization lab to open the blocked artery. Often stents are used to help stabilize the artery and keep it open.

Stents should likely be implanted ONLY for acute heart events. Yet a recent New York study on patients who had coronary stents implanted (published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology) revealed some disturbing results. This study suggests that two-thirds of the justifications for this procedure in NON-emergency patients were either “uncertain” or “inappropriate“. Clinical guidelines require that a coronary artery must be at least 70% blocked before a stent is appropriate to help open it up (and most cardiologists consider anything less than a 50% blockage to be “insignificant”).