Objectives To evaluate long-term clinical outcomes of overlapping heterogeneous drug-eluting stents (DES) compared with homogeneous DES.

Design and setting The catholic medical centre coronary intervention database is a multicentre database of percutaneous coronary intervention with DES. This database contains data on consecutive patients from eight coronary intervention centres in Korea.

Patients Overlapping homogeneous DES were used in 940 patients and overlapping heterogeneous DES in 140 patients between January 2005 and June 2010.

Intervention The study enrolled patients with one-vessel disease treated with two overlapping DES in one lesion.

Main outcome measures The study end point was the occurrence of major adverse cardiac events (MACE), defined as cardiac death, myocardial infarction (MI) or target lesion revascularisation (TRL).

Results The two patient groups had similar baseline clinical and angiographic characteristics. MACE, cardiac death, MI and TRL rates, were not significantly different between the homogeneous and heterogeneous DES groups (9.9% vs 11.4%, p=0.574; 2.7% vs 3.6%, p=0.578; 1.5% vs 1.4%, p=1.000; 5.7% vs 6.4%, p=0.747, respectively). In addition, it was found that overlap with second-generation DES may be safe and effective, and the sirolimus-eluting stent (SES)+SES group had higher rate of MACE-free survival than the paclitaxel-eluting stent (PES)+PES group (p=0.014).

Conclusions Overlapping heterogeneous DES and overlapping homogeneous DES had similar long-term safety and efficacy outcomes.