I hope either Mrs. Doubtfire or any of the medical people here can help me out. Alan is a little worried about an article he read in the paper today so I went on the internet and sure enough it's on the internet also.

Alan by the way has a CYPHER Implant. It's made by Johnson & Johnson....

here's the article.........

"As doctors at a European cardiology conference weighed new findings about drug-coated stents, the Natick medical-device maker said its Taxus stent, which has been implanted in more than 2 million people worldwide , has a slight but real chance of causing dangerous blood clots long after it has been implanted.

The company's stock dropped about 3 percent on the day's trading, as investors worried that the clots will cause doctors to reduce their use of Taxus stents.

Though only the size of a pen spring, the drug-coated stent is one of the most profitable medical devices in the world, bringing in more than $5 billion a year for its two main manufacturers, Boston Scientific and Johnson & Johnson. It is used to prop open blocked arteries after they have been cleared, and its popularity among heart doctors has vaulted Boston Scientific into the ranks of the world's largest device companies.

But stents cannot be removed after they are implanted, and in the past year doctors have begun to look hard at their long-term effects. Last fall, major studies began to show a handful of cases of blood clots in patients with drug-eluting stents, compared with little or no clotting in patients with older and less expensive bare-metal stents. At the time, both Boston Scientific and Johnson & Johnson said the numbers were not statistically significant.

Since then, independent European studies have continued to suggest that both companies' drug-coated stents can cause clots six months or more after being implanted"
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I'd like to reassure Alan that he's not going to drop dead in the gym.
By the way, he's starting to look like ROCKY BALBOA.

thanks for any info.
Melody