Incomplete coronary revascularization: a cautionary tale

Recently, Chang et al. found that incomplete coronary revascularization using drug-eluting stents demonstrated similar mortality to complete coronary revascularization in multivessel coronary artery disease (1). The authors found a higher risk of post-intervention myocardial infarction in patients with incomplete revascularization, but other important outcomes such as death, stroke, and repeat revascularization were no different. These results suggest that a less rigorous approach to percutaneous revascularization might be tolerable, but must be interpreted with caution due to several significant limitations of the study.