Early vessel healing of the Avantgarde cobalt-chromium coronary stent: the ON-GARDE OCT study.

Uncoverage and malapposition of stent struts at optical coherence tomography (OCT) have been associated with stent thrombosis. Stent uncoverage by OCT is being used as a surrogate to address the propensity of a stent to develop thrombosis. We aimed to appraise early vessel healing in patients with ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) treated with the novel Avantgarde stent. Patients with STEMI and multivessel disease were enrolled. The stent deployed on the infarct-related artery was imaged by frequency domain-OCT during deferred intervention (4-7 days apart). The primary end-point was the percentage of uncovered struts. Secondary end-points were the percentage of malapposed struts and struts covered with thrombus. Twenty patients (20 lesions) were enrolled, with 18 (18 stents) achieving a complete OCT pull-back and thus entering the final analysis (1497 cross-sections, 11 446 struts). Uncovered struts were 3.9%, whilst 8.0% of struts were malapposed and 2.6% were covered by thrombus. At per-stent analysis, all stents but two had a homogeneous distribution of strut coverage (i.e. % of uncovered struts ≥10). This study, originally exploiting OCT data early after stenting in STEMI patients, shows that the Avantgarde stent is associated with favourable vessel healing features.