CardioExchange Archive

At the Saturday afternoon Late-Breaking Interventional Clinical Science session, Dr. Helene Eltchaininoff presented early results on outcomes following trans-catheter aortic valve implantations peformed in 244 patients in the French Multicenter Registry.  Overall 30-day mortality was 12.7% and incidence of vascular access related complications was 6.5%.  The outcomes results are comparable to the recently reported experience of a Canadian group that performed aortic valve implantations using trans-arterial and trans-apical approaches.  Providing some context for these data is another AHA presentation by an American group on limitations of wide-spread application of trans-catheter aortic valve implantations.  They found that among 267 patients referred for the procedure, two thirds were deemed unsuitable.  A major reason was mismatch between limited femoral vascular access and need for larger aortic valve size.  They report that improvements in technology may change this trend over time.