Valve replacement is also possible without surgery!

There are a large number of patients with heart valve disease in China, and such diseases not only seriously affect the quality of life of patients, but also seriously endanger their lives. The conventional treatment is to open the chest and draw blood into the machine, stop the heart, remove the damaged valve and sew on an artificially made valve. Conventional surgery has the disadvantages of being risky, traumatic, and having a long recovery time, but it is an effective way for patients to survive. In an effort to give patients a new lease on life with less trauma, this century has seen the emergence of percutaneous interventional valve replacement, a procedure that does not require a chest opening, but simply involves passing a tube through the leg, into the heart, and then feeding a stent through the tube with a valve inside. This method requires only a rice-sized incision to complete the valve replacement surgery! Xiangbin Pan, Department of Pediatric Cardiac Surgery, Fu Wai Hospital, Beijing For congenital heart disease, there are many patients with pulmonary regurgitation in China, especially after surgery for tetralogy of Fallot. Because of the need to widen the narrow pulmonary valve annulus with a patch during early surgery, many patients develop severe pulmonary regurgitation after surgery, and long-term pulmonary regurgitation can cause an increase in right ventricular volume load, leading to Long-term pulmonary regurgitation causes an increase in right ventricular volume load, leading to enlargement of the right ventricular cavity, followed by a gradual decrease in right ventricular systolic blood expulsion function, right heart insufficiency, a significant decrease in exercise tolerance, and even arrhythmias and sudden death. Early replacement of the pulmonary valve can effectively improve right ventricular function, but a second surgical open-heart procedure to sew in a new prosthetic pulmonary valve is not only difficult, but also extremely risky. Percutaneous pulmonary valve stenting is a boon for these patients! The percutaneous pulmonary valve stent was first designed in 2000 by Professor Philipp Bonhoeffer in France and was successfully used in humans using catheter technology. Since then, percutaneous pulmonary valve stenting has rapidly become a hot topic of research due to its minimal invasiveness, good initial results, and the ability to repeat the procedure multiple times. As of 2012, more than 4,500 pulmonary valve stents have been used in 35 countries worldwide. Training in pulmonary valve stenting is available at 85 centers in the United States. However, the high cost of prosthetic pulmonary valve stents currently used in Europe and the United States (nearly RMB 200,000 for valve stents) and the difficulty of importing them have greatly limited the development of this technology in China. In order to change this situation, Chinese patients can really benefit from this technology. The multi-disciplinary collaboration of Fu Wai Cardiovascular Hospital has developed a new self-expanding valve stent for clinical application, and many patients with massive pulmonary regurgitation have successfully undergone percutaneous pulmonary valve stent implantation in our hospital, achieving the goal of replacing the pulmonary valve without surgery, reducing the patient’s pain and risk, and greatly reducing medical costs. Currently, Fu Wai Cardiovascular Hospital is an international leader in this field, and Professor Pan Xiangbin’s team has been invited to demonstrate percutaneous pulmonary valve stenting and teach related experience at international conferences for many times, which has been highly evaluated by domestic and international experts. We hope that more centers in China will be able to perform percutaneous valve replacement in the near future, which will be a blessing for all patients!