When you have a heart attack, doctors often open the blocked artery with a tiny mesh tube called a stent. Most stents are made of metal and stay in your body forever. But a newer option, the Magmaris scaffold, is made of magnesium and designed to dissolve over time. The idea is that once the artery heals, nothing is left behind.
A new analysis of the available research, which included over 600 patients, compared the Magmaris scaffold to standard drug-eluting stents in people with acute coronary syndrome. After one year, the overall rate of major heart problems was similar between the two devices. However, people who got the Magmaris scaffold were more than twice as likely to need a repeat procedure to reopen the same artery.
The good news: the scaffold was placed successfully in nearly 99% of cases, and the rate of dangerous blood clots was low. But the evidence is limited and comes from small studies with wide confidence intervals, meaning the results are not very precise. The researchers caution that the Magmaris scaffold is not yet a proven alternative to standard stents for heart attack patients.