Fluvastatin for Prevention of Cardiac Events Following Successful First Percutaneous Coronary Intervention<SUBTITLE>A Randomized Controlled Trial</SUBTITLE>

ERCUTANEOUS CORONARY INTERvention (PCI) comprises a group of procedures that are used to relieve ischemic symptoms due to coronary atherosclerotic narrowing in patients with increasingly earlier stages of coronary heart disease (CHD).The most frequently performed PCI procedure is balloon angioplasty with or without stenting.In the United States, balloon angioplasty procedures increased nearly 4-fold between 1987 and 1999, and in 1999, 1.1 million angioplasty procedures, both with and without stent placement, were performed in the United States alone. 1 Percutaneous coronary intervention has been demonstrated to be at least as effective as coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) in terms of survival and pre-vention of myocardial infarction (MI) in appropriately selected patients with either single-vessel or multivessel disease. 2,3Although PCI achieves shortterm improvements in ischemic