J Thorac Cardiovasc Surg 2009;138:1071-1072
© 2009 The American Association for Thoracic Surgery
Discussion
| The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below. |
Dr Eric Roselli
(Cleveland, Ohio). I am also a co-investigator for the percutaneous valve trial.
Congratulations on a commendable early experience with this new transapical technology. For now, I believe the real advantage of this approach is that it offers the ability to provide nonoperative candidates a viable treatment option for symptomatic and fatal disease. Although the EuroSCOREs were similar, this scoring system, like others, has been criticized for the inability to capture less quantifiable factors that make a patient high risk. Furthermore, you could not have matched patients for technical expertise during that initial learning curve phase, although you did a nice job of addressing that point. Were any of these 21 patients deemed to be in inoperable condition and therefore part of a different population from the matched cohort, and were any symptomatic patients with severe aortic stenosis treated medically during this time period? If so, how did they do?
Dr Doss. Thank you very much for your comments. Of course, matching these patients is . . . [Full Text of this Article]
Copyright © 2009 by The American Association for Thoracic Surgery.
