Vancouver doctor unveils procedure that could revolutionize heart surgery
Posted October 30, 2017 9:14 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
DENVER (NEWS 1130) – A Vancouver doctor says open-heart surgery could be a thing of the past.
Cardiologist Dr. David Wood with Vancouver General Hospital studied 411 patients who had this procedure and gave his results to thousands of doctors in Denver, CO, at the Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics conference.
“We’re always going to need open heart surgery,” he says.
The operation called 3M transcatheter aortic valve replacement for treating aortic heart valve disease.
“It wasn’t enough to do this just in Vancouver,” he says, adding that they have done the procedure at 13 centres across North America, 11 of those in Canada.
He explains that instead of opening up a patient’s chest and cutting into their heart, they put a small tube the size of a pinkie finger into their leg and send a balloon into the heart’s valve where they work.
As people get older, the heart’s main valve gets narrower, giving less blood to your brain and limbs and Wood warns that half of the people who start getting these symptoms die within months.
“The new valve immediately starts working normally, you get twice as much blood going to your head, your lungs, your body,” he says.
He says patients go through this surgery awake without a breathing tube, catheter, long hospital stays, or exposing a vital organ.
“The procedure typically takes now about 45 minutes, with just a little bit of sedation to make your comfortable,” he says. “You’re walking four hours later, and you’re discharged the next day.”
Eighty per cent of those 411 patients went home the next day, 90 per cent in two days.
High and intermediate-risk patients averaging around 80 patients could have this procedure done in Canada and Wood hopes it can be extended to low-risk patients in a couple years.
