Drug Eluting Balloon Versus Drug Eluting Stent in Coronary Artery Disease PCI: Insights From a Meta-analysis of 1462 Patients

Drug eluting balloons (DEB) have been developed to overcome the limitations of drug eluting stent (DES), but clinical results of different studies about DEB are not consistent. Thus, we performed a meta-analysis to compare outcomes of DEB and DES in coronary artery disease (CAD).

The meta-analysis was performed according to the recommended methods [14-15]. A systematic search for eligible studies involved MEDLINE, CENTRAL, Embase, Highwire Press, Scopus and Google Scholar databases and was conducted without language restriction by two independent investigators (A.L. and A.R.), using the following keywords: "drug", "eluting" "balloon(s)", "DEB", "coronary", "angioplasty". Divergences were resolved by consensus. Endnote software v. 10 was used to build up libraries of results that were combined after erasing duplicates. The references of retrieved studies were searched manually for additional trials, and efforts to contact authors were performed to obtain further study details or additional references. The search is updated to December 2012.

Selection criteria: citations were screened at title and abstract level and retrieved as full reports.

• Inclusion criteria were: 1) randomized studies or cohort studies reporting a comparison between a DEB treated group and a DES treated group; 2) availability of reports of late lumen loss (LLL) and/or overall death and/or myocardial infarction (MI) and/or stent thrombosis (ST) and/or target lesion revascularization (TLR).
• Exclusion criteria were: 1) duplicate reporting (in which case the manuscript reporting the largest sample or the longest follow-up was selected), 2) follow up of at least 6 months; 3) studies presenting composite major adverse cardiac events (MACE) without mentioning individual end points. Data were abstracted on pre-specified forms by 2 unblinded reviewers; divergences were resolved by consensus.

Internal validity : the present meta-analysis was performed according to the Guidelines for randomized controlled trials of the Cochrane Collaboration and for non randomized studies in compliance with the Guidelines of the MOOSE group. Quality of included studies was appraised by 2 unblinded investigators. The risk of selection, performance, detection, and attrition bias (expressed as low risk of bias [A], moderate risk of bias [B], high risk of bias [C], or incomplete reporting leading to inability to ensure the underlying risk of bias [D]) were evaluated separately, as recommended. Non-randomized studies were evaluated using the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale a validated technique in assessing the quality of non-randomized studies.