I just received an email from Mel, an eighty year old patient that requires [1] aortic valve replacement. Mel wrote to me, “Adam - I am 80 years old and will need an aortic valve replacement in the coming months. Do you have any experience with people in my age bracket who have had this replacement. What has been their experience?”

This is one of the more common questions I receive from elderly patients and caregivers of elderly patients needing heart valve repair or heart valve repair surgery. Recently, some interesting information has been published about this exact topic - valve surgery in those over eighty years old.

In one new study, it was found that age should not disqualify elderly patients from having heart valve surgery.

Dr. Farzan Filsoufi and colleagues from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City found that patients 80 years of age or older who underwent aortic valve replacement fared nearly as well as younger patients, according to Reuters Health.

With the aging of the population (e.g. the baby boomers), valve surgery is expected to become more common in the United States. In this new report, published in Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, researchers reviewed the records of 1,308 consecutive patients who underwent the procedure at Mount Sinai between 1998 and 2006. Of these patients, 17.6 percent were 80 or older. The report found that older patients were no more likely to die in the hospital than the younger patients.

There were some elements of the report that did uncover some challenges for the elderly patients following heart valve surgery.

• Elderly patients did have a greater risk of respiratory failure
• Elderly patients spent an average of 10 days while younger patients stay five days less.

The real good news of the report? About two thirds of the oldest patients lived for at least 5 years after the operation, a rate of survival comparable to people of the same age in the general population. Dr. Filsoufi believes that the advances in cardiac surgery technology is the key reason for the positive findings of the study. And, he believes that less invasive surgical techniques (percurtaneous, robotics) may enhance the elderly results further.

I hope that helps answer Mel’s question about heart valve surgery for the elderly.

Keep on tickin!

[2] To learn more about Adam’s heart valve surgery book, click here.