BACKGROUND There are few studies comparing the efficacy of different drug-eluting stents and their long-term clinical outcomes in percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) of chronic total occlusive (CTO) lesions.

METHODS AND RESULTS To compare the efficacy of sirolimus-eluting stents (SES) and paclitaxel-eluting stents (PES) for CTO, and to identify predictors of outcome after PCI, 200 patients with at least 1 successfully revascularized CTO were enrolled into either a SES (n=132) or PES (n=71) group. At 6-9-month angiographic follow-up, SES was superior to PES (late loss 0.27+/-0.60 vs 0.53+/-0.62 mm, P=0.04). During mean follow-up of 2 years, the SES group had a significantly lower cumulative target vessel failure (TVF) rate than the PES group (14.9% vs 28.4%, P=0.01), as a consequence of lower target vessel revascularization (9.7% vs 23.9%, P=0.01) and also a partially lower rate of myocardial infarction (MI: 3.1% vs 7.6%, P=0.04). SES was also superior to PES in both early (<or=9 months) and late (>9 months) TVF (P=0.02 for log-rank test, respectively). Predictors for TVF were use of PES (hazard ratio (HR) 3.81, P<0.01), previous history of MI (HR 4.06, P<0.01), diabetes (HR 2.07, P=0.04) and chronic kidney disease (CKD; HR 3.56, P=0.05).

CONCLUSIONS CTO lesions treated with SES showed better angiographic and long-term clinical outcomes than those treated with PES. Factors such as stent type, infarct-related CTO, diabetes and CKD affect the outcome of CTO intervention.