A novel heart valve replacement method offers hope for patients with rheumatic heart disease who have to undergo the procedure annually, its developers have reported.
A team in South Africa has developed a non-occlusive transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) device. It is self-locating and does not need sophisticated cardiac imaging for positioning, they say.
Revealing the method at the annual congress of the South African Heart Association, in Cape Town, Dr Jacques Scherman, a cardiac surgeon in the Chris Barnard Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery, University of Cape Town, said that they found the device easy to use and that the procedure could be performed without rapid ventricular pacing.
“We showed that this new non-occlusive, self-locating TAVI delivery system made it easy to perform transcatheter aortic valve replacement,” he said yesterday (11 September, 2016).
“Using tactile feedback, the device is stabilised in the correct position within the aortic root during the implantation. It also has a temporary backflow valve to prevent blood leaking backwards into the ventricle during the implantation of the new valve.
“All these factors together allowed for a slow, controlled implantation compared to the currently available balloon expandable devices.”
He said the simplified TAVI replacement could be done in hospitals without cardiac surgery at a fraction of the cost of conventional TAVI.
“It has the potential to save the lives of the large numbers of rheumatic heart disease patients in need of valve replacement,” he added.
The novel method compares to the existing procedure with a balloon-expandable TAVI device, which requires sophisticated cardiovascular imaging to correctly position the new valve. The current method also needs a temporary pacemaker to be used, which allows the heart to beat so quickly that it stops blood circulating to the rest of the body.
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