The era of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) has led to substantial changes in the management of patients with acute coronary syndromes and stable coronary heart disease, with an associated range of impacts on the course and outcomes of subsets of patients with these conditions. Interventional cardiology has moved from percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA), with or without administration of tissue plasminogen activator or other thrombolytic agent, to the combined use of PTCA and implantation of a bare-metal stent (BMS) or multiple stents, to PTCA and implantation of 1 or more drugeluting stents (DES) (1-3). As first-generation DES, See page 1314 paclitaxel-eluting stents (PES) and sirolimus-eluting stents (SES) have had extensive clinical application. The evolution in treatment has been associated with a progressive decrease in short-term complications, including early thrombosis, and a decrease in short-term and long-term restenosis (2,3). Optimal results with PTCA and stent placement requires concomitant antithrombotic drug therapy to avoid shortterm thrombotic occlusion (4). Although the implementation of first-generation DES has resulted in a marked decrease in the incidence of restenosis, the DES are affected by a certain incidence of late and very late coronary thrombosis (2-4). The first-generation DES are now being followed by second-generation and newer DES (3).The number of patients receiving PCI and stent implants now numbers in the millions (2-4). Follow-up of these patients with clinical evaluation and imaging studies has yielded abundant data regarding clinical outcomes based on these parameters. Clinical features and imaging results also serve as the basis for assessment in randomized clinical trials. Conversely, relatively few published studies have provided information derived from direct pathological evaluation of stented coronary arteries, and these observations are necessarily limited to autopsy series of a relatively limited number of patients. The relative paucity of pathological observations is related to a constellation of factors, including the relatively low autopsy rates in most countries and the technical challenges of adequately examining coronary arteries with implanted stents. Nevertheless, direct pathological examination has an important role in providing observations and insights not available by any other approach.Insights from pathology studies have served as a basis for evolution in approaches to PCI. Pathology studies showed that PTCA results in arterial injury of variable degree, including endothelial damage, plaque fractures, variable damage and dissection of the media, and mural platelet and fibrin thrombus deposition (5-7). The vascular responses to PTCA were identified as: 1) recoil and negative remodeling or contraction of the coronary artery segment after dilation; 2) endothelial damage, often with associated thrombosis; and 3) concomitant progressive fibrocellular intimal thickening involving perturbation of vascular smooth muscle cells leading t...