New approaches to long lesions

Long coronary lesions, comprising up to 20% of the interventional practice, pose a significant challenge to the interventionalist. Several approaches have been described to treat long coronary lesions with long-term suboptimal outcomes. Atherectomy and laser treatments with or without adjunctive balloon angioplasty have not been shown to be superior to conventional balloon angioplasty alone. Preliminary data with the use of drug-eluting stents in the treatment of long coronary lesions appears to be promising even in small vessels and may eventually become the mainstay treatment of long lesions.