- Aortic stenosis, which involves the narrowing of the aortic valve that controls blood flow from the heart to the aorta, can lead to life-threatening complications such as heart attacks and stroke.
- Open heart surgery has been conventionally used for the treatment of severe aortic stenosis, but transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR), a minimally-invasive procedure, is now preferred for people who are at high risk of death or complications due to invasive surgery.
- Federal regulators have approved TAVR for the treatment of aortic stenosis patients at low surgical risk, but there is a lack of data on the long-term outcomes of this procedure.
- A new study shows that TAVR was associated with a lower risk of death, stroke, and rehospitalization but an increased risk of needing a pacemaker than open-heart surgery during the three-year follow-up period.
A recent study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology suggests that minimally invasive transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TARV) procedures led to durable superior clinical outcomes compared with open heart surgery over a 3-year follow-up period.
The researchers report that TARV led to a greater decline in the incidence of all-cause mortality and stroke as well as better performance of the replacement valve after the procedure, compared with open heart surgery.
“This study shows that the initial benefit of TAVR remained broadly consistent over the first three years,” said Dr. John Forrest, the first author of the study and an associate professor of medicine at Yale University in Connecticut, in a statement. “In patients who are at low risk for death, stroke, or other serious complications of aortic valve surgery, we need to have compelling evidence that TAVR is both safe and effective and also that the results are durable. The consistent benefit of TAVR at three years is not something that has been observed in prior studies and provides further evidence that TAVR deserves to be the…
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