A new study shows that drug-coated stents are safe enough for the heart-attack patients. The research was made on 7,217 patients and it was necessary to show that the new drug-coated stents don’t increase the risk of death and can be used instead of the older-bare stents.

And the new drugs turned out to be even safer than the older ones. During the study "we observed small absolute differences in mortality that favored drug-[coated] stents. These observations were consistent for all [heart attacks] and for both subtypes of [heart attack]," Brigham and Women's researcher Laura Mauri, MD, and colleagues reported.

So it didn’t matter what kind of heart attack it was because the two years that are at risk of death were less if the doctors used drug-coated stents for the treatment. The stents are thin mesh tubes which are used to prop open clogged arteries. The drug-coated stents give a medication which helps the artery from reclogging.

Yet, the patients have to stay on blood-thinning for over a year after they got a drug-coated stent.

Another recent study has shown that the patients who had a heart attack with a specific electrocardiogram signature have a bigger risk to die if they get a drug-coated stent instead of a bare-metal stent.

But the researchers stated in the findings published in the September 25 issue of “The New England Journal of Medicine” that only time and a look-ahead clinical trial could prove what they have just studied.