Interventional cardiology began in Switzerland in 1977, when Andreas Gruentzig performed the first successful percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA) on a 38-year-old man with angina and a focal proximal stenosis of the left anterior descending coronary artery. Despite numerous subsequent randomised trials and meta-analyses of these trials, which have shown no reduction in death or myocardial infarction,1 the use of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) has grown exponentially. Some of this growth was driven by data from clinical trials suggesting that PCI was more effective in relieving angina than medical therapy alone.