CTO CLUB: Greeting

The emergence of DES has unequivocally established PCI as the core therapeutic strategy for coronary heart disease. Even for CTOs, mid-term outcomes after recanalization are today substantially better than before as a direct result of DES, and debate at the numerous annual international conferences and symposia has expanded to focus on how best to recanalize a CTO from the different approaches gleaned from the ever-wider practical experience now available. For the last 10 years, the CTO Club has flourished as an educational forum by stressing innovative techniques such as parallel wiring and the retrograde approach. The role that the CTO Club (now in its 9th year) should play from here on, not just in Japan but in the wider world too, is to combine its traditional discussion and debate on how to achieve better and better treatment for CTOs with a strong emphasis on training the doctors grappling with CTOs to embrace the emerging strategies for treating ever more complex lesions. By also detailing longterm outcomes for DES in the setting of CTOs, the CTO Club can become a catalyst for the real improvement of long-term therapeutic outcomes for these most challenging of lesions.