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What Is The Success Rate Of Mitral Valve Repair?

As per a study published in Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery, 2015, minimally invasive mitral valve surgery is a safe and effective procedure which helps in improving mortality and morbidity.

The leaky mitral valve disease happens because of mitral valve prolapse, myxomatous mitral valve disease, and a floppy mitral valve. These mitral valves can be repaired with a success rate of 95% and more. The exact procedure to be followed depends on a number of factors including the cause to optimize the best results for the patients.^[1]

Generally heart valve repair or replacement procedure is safe and effective, but they may be associated with few complications such as damage to the blood vessels, bleeding during or after treatment, blood clots in patients with mechanical valves can lead to heart attack or stroke, infection at the site of incision, pneumonia, breathing problems, arrhythmias or valve failure.^[2]

There are studies which indicate a mitral valve repair is a safe option in people who are older than 65 years of age.^[3] It increases the quality of life in such patients and there are no complications (stroke or risk of bleeding). Patients who have undergone mitral valve prolapsed repair surgery have found a high success rate in combating the condition. The success rate of the mitral valve repair depends on the health status, the cause of mitral valve disease and other diseases.

There is 100% success rate in patients with isolated posterior leaflet prolapsed.^[4] The success rate is low in young age group who had suffered rheumatic disease.

Aging is one of the major risk factors for mitral valve disease. The elderly population is considered as high risk for performing operations as the rate of recovery seems to be slow due to age. These patients might be at risk, but considering the risk: benefit ratio surgeons perform operations in the elderly population and patients can find significant improvement in health after the procedure. Patients suffering from leaking mitral valve can under invasive surgical replacement or less invasive procedure for repair of the valve. Leaking valve causes the blood to move in the backward direction increasing the workload on the heart resulting in weak and impaired heart. The people find improvement in the quality of life after repair of the mitral valve. A mitral valve disease is asymptomatic and if symptoms appear, cardiologists prefer to manage the symptoms with medicines but when the symptoms turn severe and worst then only they opt for surgical procedures for repair or replacement.

Repairing of the valve is a less risky procedure with less invasive procedure.^[5] There is lot of data on elderly population undergoing valve replacement than repair. The results from the surgical database and from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services were published in Annals of Thoracic Surgery. As per the study which collected the information from the database of Society of Thoracic Surgeons’ cardiac surgery, 14000 patients were analyzed who underwent mitral valve repair. The patients were more than 65 years old and had undergone mitral valve repair surgery between 1991 and 2007 with a mean follow-up of nearly 6 years. The results indicate that patient who have undergone mitral valve repair the deaths during surgery were less than 3%.^[6] These patients mostly had severe mitral regurgitation and which had progressed to congestive heart failure and had advanced stage heart failure.

The patients who had a less severe form of heart failure, the post-surgical death rates were further decreased to 1.5 percent.

More than 93 percent of the patients who had undergone mitral valve repair did not require a second surgery even up to 10 years. The survival rate of such patients is more than 75 percent. It was also noted that there was a low risk of bleeding complications and decreased rates of stroke among the patients.

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What Is The Success Rate Of Mitral Valve Repair?