William Wijns, MD, is one of the most prominent European leaders for interventional cardiology and on his watch as president of the European Association for Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (EAPCI) the practice of PCI has seen spectacular growth, been buffeted by alarming criticisms, and firmly established the medical effectiveness of the procedure.

Yet recently Wijns has used his position to chastise colleagues for having lost credibility within the medical community, allowing themselves to be characterized as "spoiled children playing with toys," just at the moment where the practice of PCI is reaching maturity.

In an effort to restore professional leadership, Wijns, of Cardiovascular Center Aalst (Aalst, Belgium), has pushed for the creation of the Stent for Life program to reassert the medical value PCI over the fascination with technology, "that got us into trouble where the value of PCI is being strongly challenged, if not questioned.

"We have been so in love with these wonderful tiny devices," he told Medical Device Daily, "we have marveled at sophisticated elution and resorption rates, which are indeed fantastic and very much needed. But this is not the way we need to be speaking about PCI.

"We need to restore the image of PCI and the doctors performing these interventions by returning to a focus on the patients," he said.

"Timely PCI can be life saving, it reduces morbidity. It is now undisputable that there is a benefit for emergency revascularization. The evidence is there. And now that it becomes the right thing to do, everyone should be interested in and take part in making Stent for Life happen," he said, especially industry.

"The magic is gone," from PCI as a therapy, Wijns wrote in an editorial published in EuroIntervention, from which the following extracts are drawn:

"The excessive focus on technicality and the never-ending public controversies on the respective merits of discrete products have contributed to devaluate PCI as a therapy and those who practice it, as a professional group.

"The late recognition of the rare safety issues that are associated with drug-eluting stents has triggered a period of intense scrutiny, skepticism and sometimes animosity on behalf of non-interventional cardiologists, cardiac surgeons, journalists or lawyers. The publication of randomized trials that do not favor indiscriminate use of PCI fuelled opposition even further.

"Allegedly too, patients are submitted to device-based therapies, some of which are either insufficiently validated or poorly indicated... . The scientific validity of the evidence that we have accumulated is shaken. The robustness, the relevance, if not the honesty of the reported data are questioned altogether."

"A healthy dose of skepticism needs to be re-introduced. Physicians should refrain from compromising with the agenda of the industry. In the long term, confusion of interest is potentially damaging for everybody, including our industrial partners, as demonstrated by the current situation.

"We ourselves have allowed the scope of our field to shrink down to material trivia while failing to promote the life-saving indications of these procedures. When applied to patients with acute presentations of the disease, PCI is indeed reducing mortality, non-fatal infarction and stroke, with treatment effects superior to any other strategy. Providing this service to the community, improving procedural outcome through innovation and promoting implementation and proper funding with regulatory bodies and payers shall be the principal focus of our action."

— John Brosky, European Editor