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J Thorac Cardiovasc Surg 2009;137:509-511
© 2009 The American Association for Thoracic Surgery

Meeting Proceedings

Highlights from the Twentieth Annual Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics Meeting

Department of Surgery and Medicine, Columbia University, College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, NY

Received for publication November 19, 2008; accepted for publication November 19, 2008.

^_* Address for reprints: Mathew Williams, MD, College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, Department of Surgery and Medicine, 177 Ft. Washington Ave, MHB 7-435, New York, NY 10032. (Email: mw365@columbia.edu).

The first 300 words of the full text of this article appear below.

	Introduction

 
The 20th Annual Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT) Meeting, TCT 2008, was held in Washington, DC, October 12 through 17, 2008. TCT is the largest meeting in the world devoted to transcatheter therapies and is predominantly an interventional cardiology meeting. For the second year, a program was offered for cardiac surgeons to help bring the specialty into this rapidly progressing and exciting field. Although there were many significant trials, mostly pertaining to the treatment of coronary artery disease (as described here), the meeting focused extensively on demonstrating procedures and highlighting new technologies.

	Transcatheter Valve Therapy

 
One of the better-attended sessions was the valvular heart disease summit. This included an excellent review of current surgical procedures but focused mainly on emerging transcatheter techniques. The summit provided updated experiences with current devices, as well as first human trials and preliminary work for many devices on the horizon. Although the data are largely encouraging, most work is preliminary and not really appropriate for discussion until more data become available. Two systems are currently approved for use in Europe and have been applied with variable but generally encouraging success.

CoreValve
The experience from Siegburg, Germany, with the 18F self-expanding CoreValve system (CoreValve Inc, Irvine, Calif) was presented.¹ Implant success was 97.1%, with no procedural mortality. The 30-day mortality was 10.8%, with a stroke rate of 2.9%. The 1-year survival was 84.3%. No patient had residual aortic stenosis, and all had improvement in symptoms. Relative to baseline, 34.6% of patients had a reduction of aortic insufficiency, 34.6% had no change, and 30.9% had worsening of aortic insufficiency.

SAPIEN Valve
An experience with the SAPIEN transcatheter aortic valve (Edwards Lifesciences LLC, Irvine, Calif) was presented from Vancouver, BC, Canada, the site with the largest worldwide experience.² The data were generally impressive. In particular, the center broke down their 114 transfemoral cases into tertiles. . . . [Full Text of this Article]