When 91-year-old Irvin Lafferty was diagnosed with severe blockage of his heart valve-hardening that is formally known as aortic valve stenosis-open-heart surgery was out of the question.
He'd already survived quadruple bypass while in his 50s, and having lived almost a century, Lafferty wasn't a good candidate for heart surgery for many reasons. His local cardiologist referred him to surgical and interventional specialists at Chicago's Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute of Northwestern Memorial Hospital. And, on January 21, 2009, Lafferty became the first patient in Illinois to receive a prosthetic heart valve through a procedure known as transapical transcatheter aortic valve implantation, which combines catheterization technology and traditional surgery, allowing doctors to implant a new heart valve in place of Lafferty's diseased valve while his heart remained beating.
"Traditional open-heart surgery is a very safe and effective way to replace diseased heart valves, but for many patients bypass surgery is not a viable option" says Patrick M. McCarthy, MD, Northwestern Memorial's chief of cardiothoracic surgery and co-director of its Bluhm Institute and a Heller-Sacks professor of surgery at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. "By utilizing the percutaneous technique-meaning surgery is not required-we are able to greatly reduce risk for these patients. We see percutaneous valve repair as not only having a great impact upon how high-risk patients are treated, but in how heart valve disease is treated period, in the U.S. and around the world."
McCarthy is a co-principal investigator for the clinical trial that provided Lafferty's new heart valve, which is formally referred to as the Placement of AoRTic TraNscathetER Valve, or PARTNER. The Bluhm Institute is among the trial's pioneering sites. McCarthy says the procedure builds upon a routine catheter-based procedure, the balloon aortic valvuloplasty.
"Balloon aortic valvuloplasty has been traditionally offered as a palliative therapy for patients who were not candidates for aortic valve surgery," said the hospital's Director of the Cardiac Catheterization Laboratory Charles J. Davidson, MD, who is also a co-principal investigator for the trial and a professor of medicine at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. "This particular technique is a more durable treatment than balloon valvuloplasty and is potentially a breakthrough for treating high-risk patients."