Coronary Stenting Side Effects and Warnings

Possible Complications

If you are planning to have a stent, your doctor will review a list of possible complications, which may include:

• Bleeding at the point of the catheter insertion
• Damage to the walls of arteries, causing you to need additional procedures or surgery
• Heart attack or arrhythmia (abnormal heart beats)
• Allergic reaction to x-ray dye
• Blood clot formation
• Infection

Sometimes the procedure is not successful or the artery narrows again. You may require repeat angioplasty or coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG).

Factors that may increase the risk of complications include:

• Allergies to medicines, shellfish, or x-ray dye
• Obesity
• Smoking
• Bleeding disorder
• Age: 60 or older
• Recent pneumonia
• Recent heart attack
• Diabetes
• Kidney disease

Call Your Doctor

After you leave the hospital, contact your doctor if any of the following occurs:

• Signs of infection, including fever and chills
• Redness, swelling, increasing pain, excessive bleeding, or any discharge from the incision site
• Your arm or leg becomes painful, blue, cold, numb, tingly, swollen, or increasingly bruised
• Nausea and/or vomiting that you cannot control with the medicines you were given after surgery, or which persist for more than two days after discharge from the hospital
• Pain that you cannot control with the medicines you have been given
• Pain, burning, urgency or frequency of urination, or persistent bleeding in the urine
• Cough, shortness of breath, or chest pain
• Joint pain, fatigue, stiffness, rash, or other new symptoms
• Extreme sweating

In case of an emergency, CALL 911.