Stenting is a specialised treatment for coronary arteries that are narrowed or blocked by plaques.
Like angioplasty, it involves placing a balloon into the narrowed portion of the coronary artery but differs in that a wire mesh (stent) which surrounds the balloon is expanded following balloon inflation and remains in the vessel keeping the plaque pushed outwards.

While the balloon is inflated to deploy the stent in the artery, you may or may not feel pain (like your angina) in the chest as blood cannot flow along the vessel. The pain only lasts while the balloon is inflated which is usually for about 1 minute. Once the stenting is completed, patients usually stay overnight in hospital before going home. This is to ensure that no problems have arisen after the procedure and also to allow time for the small site where the tubes were inserted to heal.

Stenting is becoming increasingly popular and used more frequently than angioplasty alone to treat blockages. The reason for this is that a complication of angioplasty called restenosis is less common with stenting. The process called restenosis is where an excessive healing process at the site of angioplasty in the vessel wall leads to repeat narrowing of the artery. Restenosis has also been greatly reduced by the introduction since 2000 of drug eluting stents (DES). These are stents that were coated with a drug during manufacturing. After placement in an artery, the drug slowly elutes out locally and prevents the exaggerated response to the trauma that the artery felt when it was stretched. By preventing this response, there is much less restenosis and so less recurrence of angina.

Another advantage of stenting is that cracks that may occur in the artery wall after angioplasty can be sealed off and thus the need for patients to go for emergency bypass surgery is reduced.

As with angioplasty, clotting at the time of stenting may occur but this is much less problematic today due to the availability of new drugs to prevent clotting. However, as a foreign body (i.e. metal) has been placed in your artery, in the long term, you need to remain on some drug to keep your blood thin and prevent clotting (such as aspirin or clopidogrel). You should ask your doctor which drugs and for how long you need to take them for. Also, if asked to stop a blood thinner in the future, for an operation or after an injury for example, you need to let people know that you have a stent in your artery and whether it is a drug elutin (DES) or bare metal stent (BMS).