Device allows effective, quick mitral valve repair

Imagine that you are chronically fatigued and short of breath even when lying down. Your legs and ankles are swollen, and you have an increased heart rate. These are symptoms that almost 6 million Americans may contend with because they have heart failure — the inability of the heart to pump enough blood throughout the body to keep organs and tissue healthy and happy.

If you have this condition, it can cause the heart muscle to weaken and stretch out like an overblown balloon. That pulls apart the mitral valve — its job is to open and close the door between the heart’s upper left-hand chamber (the atrium) and the lower chamber (the ventricle). When that happens, the flow of oxygen-rich blood out of your heart to the rest of your body backs up, and you develop what’s called mitral regurgitation. Your symptoms worsen, and your risk of death from heart failure increases.

But if a surgeon can fix the valve, even if the heart cannot be replaced, your well-being will improve greatly. Unfortunately, until now, heart failure with mitral valve regurgitation often made mitral valve repair or replacement necessary, complete with cracking open your ribcage and stopping your heart so that surgeons can go deep inside it.

These are risky procedures, especially for people who have heart failure. Not surprisingly, many patients are not able to undergo the procedures.

But what if doctors developed a stealthy treatment that allowed them to sneak inside your heart without the trauma and risk of open heart surgery? That would be terrific, and they have.

In a stunning example of medical innovation, doctors, engineers and entrepreneurs worked for two decades to develop the MitraClip. The clip is attached to your sagging mitral valve and allows the valve to once again open and then close completely in synchronization with your beating heart.

This dime-size device was originally conceived by Dr. Oz in 1996. It is based on insights into the workings of the mitral valve by an Italian surgeon named Antonio Alfieri. Says Dr. Oz: “Alfieri explained that the mitral valve works like a zipper, and when it fails in this way, all surgeons need to do is place one stitch to restart the closing process.”

But there had been some resistance to using the device, because large clinical trials hadn’t yet demonstrated success. Well, that’s old news now.

In a recently published study in the New England Journal of Medicine, lead author Greg Stone (Dr. Oz’s colleague from NewYork-Presbyterian) and dozens of collaborators published evidence of the MitraClip’s effectiveness.

Their study followed 614 patients (303 received the device; the rest received standard treatments). Over two years, those receiving the clip saw their risk of getting admitted to the hospital cut in half. Even more importantly, over five years of follow-up, the device reduced the risk of death in those receiving the clip by an astounding 38 percent.

“The trial proved for the first time, without a shadow of a doubt, that the device works,” says Dr. Oz.