<International Circulation>:  The 2009 updated ACC/AHA Guidelines for the Management of Patients with STEMI and the ACC/AHA/SCAI Guidelines for PCI preferred DES to BMS for patients undergoing emergent PCI (class IIa/level B). Can you comment on this recommendation? Also， what do you think about the role of BMS in the future; will they be replaced completely by DES?

Prof. Smits: This recommendation is quite new and this class IIa/level B， which means that you can contemplate using drug-eluting stents in a STEMI patient. As usual， there is a short time lag between the guidelines and current clinical practice， but I think they are correct. There is no hard indication yet to place a DES in all STEMI patients. I would like to emphasize that you can’t generalize all drug-eluting stents and there are going to be some differences between different drug-eluting stents in STEMI patients. I personally believe that DES will replace BMS， although on economic grounds there may still be a place for bare-metal stents in a certain subset of patients.