Pulmonary Valve implant without open-heart surgery

[Marguerite53]

Hi All. My husband noticed this in our local news blog. Oregon Health Sciences University (OHSU) here in Portland, is making headway with pulmonary valve implants:
"“The remarkable thing about this procedure is that the valve is placed into the beating heart through a vein in the patient’s leg," said Laurie Armsby, M.D., associate professor of pediatric cardiology at OHSU Doernbecher and Burch’s partner in the OHSU Pediatric and Adult Congenital Cardiac Catheterization Lab. "After the procedure, patients spend a night on the hospital ward and are discharged home the following morning.”

Here's a link to the short article from our ABC affiliate.
http://www.katu.com/news/local/115125159.html

And, more specifically a link, from OHSU website:

http://www.ohsu.edu/xd/about/news_events/news/2011/02-02-ohsu-fixes-complex-heart.cfm

The device, called the Medtronic Melody® Transcatheter Pulmonary Valve, recently was approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The valve is used to replace a narrow or leaky pulmonary valve “conduit” — a tube connecting the heart to the lungs...........

Good stuff!

Marguerite

 

[Greg a]

Interesting read thanks for posting

 

[Lynlw]

I know a few people that have had this done and are doing really well.

 

[neil]

good stuff

 

[ottagal]

Thanks for the interesting article.
It is very encouraging for me to read this as I have some pulmonary valve regurg. and stenosis which isn't severe enough for surgery at any time in the near future (yeah). After my AVR, my surgeon said that by the time they will need to address my pulmonary valve issue which is many years away, it would be the endovascular approach (as just described). Good to know that it is already being done.
Interestingly, I have a bicuspid pulmonary valve (discovered intraop) which apparently is not as common as a bicuspid aortic valve (which I had).

 

[catwoman]

This is interesting. Previous stories I have read concerned aortic valves, I believe, and those involved patients too weak or frail to withstand traditional OHS.
Not sure if I've seen any percutaneous VR of mitrals or tricuspids.

 

[Jkm7]

Percutaneous valve replacement is not now some far off over the rainbow dream. It is here and now. Thanks so much for this post. We've been reading more and more of this.

It is going to make choosing tissue valve so much easier for so many people.
Blessings to those wonderful researchers developing these techniques and the surgeons learning to do them.

 

[carolinemc]

This is one step of many for the future of many kinds of new surgery. We have to keep apraised of more advances and keep our minds open to the new procedures to make our lives easier. It is never easy to be born with heart problems and nothing to be done. But we all know better, thanks to the imagination of modern medical science. Keep marching on.