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Adam's Heart Valve Surgery Blog
Heart Valve Surgery Patient & Author, Adam Pick
Writes About Heart Valve Repair & Replacement Surgery Watch Adam's Video |
It’s time for another “True or False” quiz… That said, is the following statement true or false?
The American Heart Association just reported that twice as many Americans are hospitalized with heart failure today compared to 25 years ago.
The older I get… The more I realize there are no short-cuts in the game of life. Whether it deals with money or weight loss, the “sure thing” is seldom a sure thing.
An unfortunate example… A new study published by BMC Medical just revealed some disastrous findings about the use of Fen-Phen for weight loss and its long-term side effect… Heart valve damage known as mitral regurgitation and aortic regurgitation.
To learn more, read this interesting article by WebMD Health News by clicking “Fen-Phen Damages Heart Valves… Several Years Later”.
Keep on tickin!
Two critical questions for patients needing heart valve replacement – due to aortic stenosis, mitral valve prolapse and/or regurgitation – are, “How long does a valve replacement last?” and “Will I need a reoperation?”
While there are many different answers to that question, here is some very interesting information specific to St. Jude Medical’s Biocor™ Stented Tissue Valve. According to St. Jude Medical, this pig valve replacement provided excellent long-term durability for the aortic valve in patients 65 years and older.
The study, which appears in the October issue of the cardiac journal The Annals of Thoracic Surgery, evaluated the 20-year durability of the Biocor porcine valve in the aortic position. According to the study, over the 20-year follow-up period, the Biocor valve was found to perform well on key measures of long-term performance including freedom from reoperation due to structural valve deterioration (the rate at which patients remain free from another operation related to degeneration that could affect the valve’s proper functioning).
The study found that the Biocor valve’s rate of freedom from reoperation for structural valve deterioration was 86.5 percent at 20 years compared to data reported for other tissue valves which have ranged from 52.9 to 67 percent (in 17 to 20 year follow-up studies).
The Biocor valve study, which was sponsored by St. Jude Medical, consecutively enrolled 455 patients who received a St. Jude Medical Biocor tissue valve to replace their aortic valve at the German Heart Center Munich from Jan. 1985 through Dec. 1996. Follow-up occurred between 2003 and 2006. Using standardized follow-up methods, researchers received responses to a questionnaire or reviewed the medical records of 99.6 percent of the enrolled patients. The study population included equal numbers of patients younger and older than its mean age of 72.5 years.
This is very encouraging news for St. Jude Medical, the valve manufacturer. I believe the results would be more encouraging if the study was run by an independent research center specific to this heart valve replacement. However, that said, the answer to the true or false question above is… False.
Keep on tickin!
I was just reading a rather frightening article about women, cardiologists and heart disease at the Dayton Daily News.
I was shocked to read a few statistics about the the incredibly large number of women that have cardiovascular disease. Furthermore, the annual mortality rate from heart disease was equally disturbing.
The genetic links of heart valve disease (aortic stenosis, mitral prolapse) are fairly well documented.
As the Children’s Hospital Boston finds, “Some congenital heart defects may have a genetic link, either occurring due to a defect in a gene, a chromosome abnormality, or environmental exposure, causing heart problems to occur more often in certain families.” More specifically, a recent study suggests, “Having a first-degree relative with mitral valve disease was found to increase the risk by 2.5 times.”
So you know, my Uncle Mooney had valve replacement surgery over 30 years before my aortic surgery. And, my Grandpa Zim (who has passed on) had heart trouble which resulted in a quadruple bypass. For this reason, I perked up in my chair when I received a very interesting email from Ed in Virginia.
Here is Ed’s email…
