{"id":256,"date":"2007-11-05T05:37:31","date_gmt":"2007-11-05T10:37:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/2007\/11\/05\/life-expectancy-after-heart-valve-surgery\/"},"modified":"2025-07-16T17:32:35","modified_gmt":"2025-07-16T22:32:35","slug":"life-expectancy-after-heart-valve-surgery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/2007\/11\/05\/life-expectancy-after-heart-valve-surgery\/","title":{"rendered":"What Is Life Expectancy After Heart Valve Surgery?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m on day three of my work trip through Japan. The jet lag is still overwhelming considering I live in Los Angeles. That said, I&#8217;ve had a few early morning hours to dig through my inbox and answer patient questions. I just received an interesting question about life expectancy after heart surgery. It reads, &#8220;Hi Adam: Thanks so much for your website! Do you know what the life expectancy is for patients after heart valve surgery?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-42478\" src=\"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/..\/Images\/Life-Expectancy-Heart-Surgery-Valve-Chikwe.jpg\" alt=\"Life Expectancy\" width=\"700\" height=\"394\" \/><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>That is a great question. Unfortunately, it is a very tough question to answer. I say that because heart valve surgery is a relatively new area of medicine. Cardiac surgery, bypass operations and heart valve therapies have only really been around for fifty years or so. For this reason, researchers are still developing their datasets as they track the lives of heart valve surgery patients.\u00a0 In addition, there are different types of heart valve surgery including valve repairs and replacement.\u00a0 Plus, patients have different health conditions and\/or co-morbidities when they undergo heart valve surgery.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h2>Dr. Chikwe Addresses Life Expectancy After Heart Valve Surgery<\/h2>\n<p>That said, I really wanted to provide an answer to this very important question.\u00a0 For that reason, I was fortunate to interview <a href=\"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/surgeons\/dr-Joanna-Chikwe-Los+Angeles-California.php\">Dr. Joanna Chikwe<\/a>, who is the Chair of Cardiac Surgery at Cedars-Sinai about this topic.\u00a0 Here are the highlights of my discussion with Dr. Chikwe about life expectancy after heart valve surgery.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/7NB3OvUXrGk?si=M1rS9Mnj_ftfoXi8\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>So you know&#8230; Last week, I received a very nice email from a patient who had her valve replaced 34 years ago. Yep. You read that right. 34 years!!! And, I recently connected with a patient who had her first heart valve operation 50 years ago!!! I hope this helps you better understand life expectancy after heart valve surgery.<\/p>\n<p>Related Links:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/2025\/06\/14\/50-year-patient-story\/\">Heart Warrior: Therese&#8217;s 50-Year Journey With Heart Valve Disease<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/learning\/mechanical-valve-patient-success-story\/\">Alan&#8217;s 37-Year Mechanical Heart Valve Replacment Success Story<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/2023\/08\/22\/scuba-dive-catalina-island\/\">17 years After Heart Surgery, This Happened!<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Keep on tickin!<br \/>\nAdam<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22547,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-heart-valve-replacement"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42481,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256\/revisions\/42481"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}