Successful Treatment of Coronary Artery Perforation with Hand-Made Covered Stent

ABSTRACTOZET Introduction With the advances in device technology, percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) has become an indispensable option for treatment of coronary artery disease (1). However, the frequency of complications associated with these procedures has also increased. Coronary artery perforation is a rare but life-threatening complication of percutane-ous coronary intervention (PCI), with an incidence of 0.2% to 0.6% (2-5). Cardiac tamponade, myocardial infarc-tion and even death are potential complications (6). Therapeutic options include emergency coronary artery by-pass grafting (CABG) surgery, covered stent implantation and embolisation if perforation occurs at distal segments of the coronary artery (7). Previously, Ellis et al. described a classification for coronary perforations. According to this classification, Type III is the most fatal type of perforation which usually needs to be treated with emergency surgery or covered stents (1). In this report we describe a case of coronary perforation which occurred during pri-mary PCI of the right coronary artery that was successfully sealed with a hand-made covered stent.