What once required days in the hospital and open heart surgery can now often be done in under 30 minutes, with patients going home the next day.
For the final Wellness Wednesday of Heart Month, two doctors performing groundbreaking heart valve procedures say success is not defined by the operation itself. It is defined by what happens afterward.
Dr. Daniel Bennett and Dr. Nirmal Sunkara specialize in structural cardiology, focusing on heart valves. Bennett recently received a note from a patient whose life has changed after treatment.
“I just read a note before I came down here from a patient that I worked on two or three different times,” Bennett said. “She’s telling me how she’s out in her yard and she’s working in her garden and she was able to spend more quality time with her grandkids this Christmas than she was last year.”
To understand heart valve disease, Sunkara offers a simple analogy.
“If you imagine a room with doors and with pipes in the walls,” Sunkara said. “Interventional cardiologists usually deal with the pipes, but we also deal with the doors and the separators between the rooms.”
Heart valves act like doors, opening and closing with each heartbeat to keep blood flowing in the right direction. When they do not function properly, the heart has to work harder.
“The most common disease condition that we deal with is something called aortic stenosis,” Sunkara said. “Aortic stenosis is where a heart valve, which is supposed to open and close with each heartbeat, it does not open as well as it should or it does not close as well as it should.”
In the past, repairing or replacing a faulty valve often meant open heart surgery and several days in the hospital. Now, many procedures can be done using a catheter inserted through the leg, avoiding major surgery.
Intermountain Medical Center has been a leader in advancing minimally invasive valve replacement procedures, including mitral valve replacement.
“Intermountain Medical Center has actually been one of the pioneers and one of the leading enrollers of replacing the mitral valve,” Bennett said. “It’s kind of been the holy grail of structural cardiology. How do you replace this mitral valve?”
The results have been significant.
“Our average length of stay for someone who gets a heart valve replacement is less than one day,” Bennett said. “Ten years ago it was two or three days, four or five days. The risk of stroke goes down. The risk of complications is going down.”
For Sunkara, the greatest reward comes from seeing patients regain their quality of life.
“When the patient tells you that they’re able to breathe better and their pain is gone and they’re feeling better, that satisfaction, that’s why we’re here,” Sunkara said. “That’s why we do what we do.”
Heart valve disease affects approximately 2.5 percent of the U.S. population, or about 9 million Americans. Doctors say the number may be even higher because symptoms such as fatigue and shortness of breath are often mistaken for normal aging.
If you are experiencing those symptoms, doctors encourage you to talk with your physician about checking your heart.
