Department of Interventional Valve Clinic: Global Hospitals, Mumbai

The heart is a fist-sized organ that pumps blood throughout your body. It’s the primary organ of your circulatory system. Your heart contains four main sections (chambers). In between these chambers there are Valves that ensure there is no back flow of the blood.

Out of the 4 valves present, the aortic and mitral valves are the commonly affected valves. A damaged or diseased valve can affect blood flow to the rest of the heart and body.

Why Choose Us?

For proper care of patients suffering with heart valve diseases a specialized team is essential which improves the overall clinical outcome for patients.

This is team is formed by a group of experts who led a Heart Valve Clinic which would comprise of Interventional Cardiologist, Cardiac Surgeon, Imaging Specialist, Anesthetist.

The purpose of a heart valve clinic is to improve patient outcomes by providing an accurate diagnosis and timely follow-up and treatment of heart valve disease. Particular importance is placed on patient education, guideline based for intervention and discussion of complex cases within a heart valve team. Services include monitoring patients with symptomatic and/or non- symptomatic valvular heart disease (VHD), such as aortic stenosis or mitral regurgitation.

Global Hospitals is one of the very few centers in India which has a dedicated Heart Team with full time Consultants available round the clock.

Treatment of Valvular diseases need special infrastructure like a high end Cath Lab, a fully functional OT or a Hybrid Lab. At Global Hospital, we are recognized to have the best in class infrastructure giving predictable and improved patient outcomes.

Symptoms

Some people with aortic valve disease may not notice symptoms for many years. Signs and symptoms of aortic valve disease may include:

• Chest pain or tightness
• Dizziness
• Fainting
• Fatigue after activity or having less ability to be active
• Shortness of breath

Diagnosis

To diagnose aortic valve disease, your doctor will usually do a physical exam and ask questions about your signs and symptoms and medical history.

Several tests may be done to diagnose aortic valve disease, including:

• Echocardiogram
• Cardiac computerized tomography (CT) scan

Treatment

Treatment for valve disease depends on:

• The severity of the valve disease
• Whether the disease is causing symptoms
• Whether the condition is getting worse

If you aren’t having symptoms, you may only need regular medical checkups to monitor the condition along with few medications.

Eventually, a Surgery or a catheter procedure may be needed to repair or replace the diseased valve.

Surgery to repair or replace a valve is often done with open-heart surgery.

There are now recent treatment modalities available which replace the diseased valve without opening the chest.

The common procedures are

1) Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement (TAVR). Somewhat similar to a stent placed in an artery, the TAVR approach delivers a fully collapsible replacement valve to the valve site through a catheter.

Once the new valve is expanded, it pushes the old valve leaflets out of the way and the tissue in the new valve takes over the job of regulating blood flow.

Benefits of TAVR

• Minimally invasive procedure – done with an instrument inserted through a blood vessel
• Less painful than the traditional open-heart surgery
• The hospital stay is reduced to 48 hours
• Offers improved quality of life in patients who cannot undergo traditional surgical aortic valve replacement

2) Mitra clip : It’s a percutaneous procedure done to repair the mitral valve regurgitation

Currently in India there are few centers that are fully equipped having a high-end Cath Lab, functional Operation Theater, or a Hybrid Cath Lab to perform a TAVR procedure with a trained expert Operator

Global Hospitals is one of those centers which is fully equipped to perform these percutaneous valve procedures.

There is a dedicated Heart Team & a Valve Clinic space which evaluates the patient’s condition closely and decides if the valve needs to be replaced or repaired and what will be the best treatment option – surgically or percutaneously.