Using a stent to open a blocked coronary artery is the treatment of choice in the early period of a heart attack (myocardial infarction). A limitation is the risk of dislodging part of the clot, leading to new downstream blockages of smaller vessels. One strategy that has been under development for a long time is thrombectomy, in which a device extracts the clot prior to the delivery of the stent. Following earlier success in small trials, the benefits of thrombectomy became controversial when a large trial, TASTE, found no evidence of benefit for the procedure.
TOTAL (Trial of Routine Aspiration Thrombectomy with PCI versus PCI Alone in Patients with STEMI), one of the largest trials ever to test a medical device, was presented at the American College of Cardiology meeting in San Diego and published simultaneously in the New England Journal of Medicine.
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