Placement of Aortic valve without open heart surgery
Hossein Dehghani, MD
There are many causes of aortic valve stenosis (tight aortic valve). Bicuspid aortic valves (normal aortic valves are tricuspid which means they have three leaflets as opposed to the two seen in Bicupid) and leaflet calcification and thickening leading to a tight valve which worsens with age are two of the most common causes. Most aortic stenosis when they are close to severe or have become severe in the stenosis criteria, need to be treated. If left alone, they will almost always progress to causing shortness of breath, chest pain, heart failure with leg swelling, syncope and ultimately death. The narrow valves put a tremendous amount of pressure on the left ventricles which is the pump/engine that sends blood forward to all our body organs.
New technology has allowed interventional cardiologists such as Dr. Dehghani who have been trained in this advanced procedure to perform placement of a prosthetic valve from the groin vessels without the need to send patients for open heart valve replacement surgeries. Patients should expect to stay in the hospital for monitoring for 1-2 days. They do not require general anesthesia and have near immediate recovery with minimal groin discomfort from the entry site.
Dr. Dehghani has consistently had excellent outcomes with this procedure which he has been performing since 2015. As a matter of fact he was the director of the TAVR program at San Antonio Regional Hospital in Upland California prior to moving to the SF Bay area. He has had no intra-procedural mortalities and has never had a TAVR case need emergency open heart surgery due to complications!
