EuroIntervention : journal of EuroPCR in collaboration with the Working Group on Interventional Cardiology of the European Society of Cardiology
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Randomized Controlled Trial Comparative Study
Design and rationale for a randomised comparison of everolimus-eluting stents and coronary artery bypass graft surgery in selected patients with left main coronary artery disease: the EXCEL trial.
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery is the standard of care for revascularisation of patients with left main coronary artery disease (LMCAD). Recent studies have suggested that percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) with drug-eluting stents (DES) may provide comparable outcomes in selected patients with LMCAD without extensive CAD. We therefore designed a trial to investigate whether PCI with XIENCE cobalt-chromium everolimus-eluting stents (CoCr-EES) would result in non-inferior or superior clinical outcomes to CABG in selected patients with LMCAD. ⋯ The EXCEL study will define the contemporary roles of CABG and PCI using XIENCE CoCr-EES in patients with LMCAD disease with low and intermediate SYNTAX scores.