Cardiac Valve Diseases and Treatments

The heart's four valves open and close roughly 100,000 times a day, and when they narrow or leak—conditions known as aortic stenosis and mitral regurgitation—the consequences range from progressive heart failure to sudden death. Cardiologists and cardiac surgeons have developed two main repair strategies: open surgical valve replacement, the long-standing standard, and transcatheter approaches that thread a new valve through a catheter without cracking the chest, expanding treatment options to patients once considered too frail for surgery. Echocardiography serves as the cornerstone for diagnosing severity, timing intervention, and evaluating how prosthetic valves perform over time, though standardizing these measurements across institutions remains an active area of guideline development. Key open questions include determining the optimal timing of intervention in patients with moderate but asymptomatic disease, understanding the long-term durability of transcatheter valves relative to surgical ones, and refining surgical risk models so that the right procedure is matched to the right patient.

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Keywords

Transcatheter Aortic-Valve ReplacementSurgical Aortic-Valve ReplacementValvular RegurgitationEchocardiography GuidelinesAortic StenosisMitral Regurgitation