Stents or surgery in coronary artery disease in 2013

In addition to optimal medical therapy, some patients with coronary artery disease also require intervention on symptomatic and/or prognostic grounds. The debate over the relative efficacies of coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) and stenting has recently been settled by the publication of the five-year outcomes of the SYNTAX and FREEDOM (in patients with diabetes) trials accompanied by supportive data from several large registries. There is also current evidence that stenting is still carried out in patients who would be better served by CABG, emphasizing the need for recommendations for intervention to be overseen by a multidisciplinary team rather than the individual practitioner.