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Javier E

Heart-Valve Patients Should Have Earlier Surgery, Study Suggests - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-surgery-aortic-stenosis.html

surgery aortic valve stenosis study research

shared by Javier E on 30 Oct 24 - No Cached
  • For decades, people with failing heart valves who nevertheless felt all right would walk out of the cardiologist’s office with the same “wait and see” treatment plan: Come back in six or 12 months. No reason to go under the knife just yet
  • The trial, whose results were published this week in The New England Journal of Medicine, could change the way doctors treat severe aortic stenosis, a narrowing of the valve that controls blood flow from the heart.
  • Replacing people’s heart valves, even if they were not yet experiencing any ill effects, appeared to roughly halve their risk of being unexpectedly hospitalized for heart problems over at least two years, the trial found.
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  • Patients who were put on the more conservative treatment plan overwhelmingly ended up needing surgery anyway: Roughly 70 percent of them developed symptoms and needed to have their valves replaced within two years, suggesting that the disease worsens more quickly than previously understood.
  • Cardiologists have long known that patients like those in the trial — people with failing heart valves but no symptoms — could sometimes deteriorate or even die.
  • Cardiologists were wary of replacing valves partly because, until recent decades, that would have required open-heart surgery, a risk that hardly seemed worth taking for patients who were able to go about their lives without trouble.
  • The emergence of a less invasive surgery opened the door to a different approach. In that surgery, called transcatheter aortic valve replacement, or TAVR, cardiologists insert a replacement valve through a patient’s groin and thread it all the way to the heart.
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