Coronary interventions approaching the year 2000.
Interventional cardiology is only 22 years old, but its successes at the end of this century stand heavily on the shoulders of innovative pioneers who labored earlier in the century. Balloon angioplasty gradually developed and eventually achieved great success in treating America's greatest health risk, coronary artery disease, through the 1980s. Both mortality benefit and symptom improvement have been demonstrated for coronary angioplasty, making it one of the most frequently performed procedures in the world today. In an effort to overcome acute complications and late restenosis, atherectomy devices and stents became useful tools over the past decade. As the generation of baby boomers begins to swell the ranks of the middle aged and elderly in the early 21st century, it is with great hope that molecular biology and the continued development of the technology of interventional cardiology will allow even greater successes in decreasing death and disability from ischemic heart disease.