New treatment could help fix the heart’s “forgotten valve”

For the first time, patients with damaged tricuspid valves in their hearts might have a safe treatment that actually helps.

More than 1 million mostly older Americans have seriously leaking tricuspids, a valve on the right side of the heart that lets deoxygenated blood flow between the right atrium and the right ventricle. When the valve leaks, blood flows backward. As a result, fluid accumulates in vital organs while legs and feet get swollen. The eventual outcome is heart failure.

Patients’ symptoms often are severe — fatigue, abdominal distention, swollen legs and general feelings of malaise. Even their eyes can get swollen, said Dr. Gregg Stone, an interventional cardiologist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

“Imagine a beach ball filled with f luid in your stomach all the time,” said Dr. Joseph Cleveland Jr., a cardiothoracic surgeon at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

Medicine to mitigate the injury causes perilous side effects, and surgical repair of the valve has usually been too dangerous to attempt.

Now, medical device company Abbott is reporting results from a clinical trial of a treatment that involves clipping the floppy tricuspid valve to make it smaller and better able to function. The results were published Saturday in The New England Journal of Medicine

And patients may soon have a different option for treatment when another company, Edwards Lifesciences, completes a clinical trial of a different approach that is underway.

For the study financed by Abbott, researchers report that the clip stopped much of the leakage. The treatment was also safe, with a less than 1% mortality risk in these very sick patients.