Bare-metal stent

A bare-metal stent is a stent made of thin, uncoated (bare) metal wire that has been formed into a mesh-like tube. In medical care, physicians place stents into narrowed blood vessels to expand the vessels, allowing for improved blood flow and oxygen delivery. While stents have most commonly been deployed in the coronary arteries in the heart, additional applications include the carotid, peripheral, and neural arteries. Overall, doctors can widen narrowed arteries by either placing expandable stents within the artery or surgically replacing the artery with synthetic blood vessels known as grafts. Stents may be favored over bypass surgery due to lower short term morbidity associated with the procedure. Stents are deployed through catheters, which are small, flexible metal tubes doctors thread through blood vessels to reach the target artery.

The first stents licensed for use in cardiac arteries were bare metal – often 316L stainless steel. More recent "second generation" bare-metal stents have been made of cobalt chromium alloy. While plastic stents were first used to treat gastrointestinal conditions of the esophagus, gastroduodenum, biliary ducts, and colon, bare-metal stent advancements led to their use for these conditions starting in the 1990s. Currently, interventional radiologists, interventional cardiologists, and vascular surgeons are the main medical subspecialties that use stents in practice.

Drug-eluting stents are often preferred over bare-metal stents because the latter carry a higher risk of restenosis, the growth of tissue into the stent resulting in vessel narrowing. However, in regions with fewer financial and medical resources, bare metal stents are still frequently deployed.