St. Paul’s Hospital performs 1,000th transcatheter heart valve procedure

ViVitro Labs congratulate St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver on their 1000th transcatheter heart valve procedure (TAVI).  The following details and video are taken from St Paul’s Hospital and Global TV releases:

VANCOUVER, JUNE 5, 2014 – On June 5, St. Paul’s Hospital (SPH)  broadcast a live transcatheter aortic valve procedure – on an awake patient (not under general anesthesia) – to the Transcatheter Valve Therapies Conference taking place June 5-7, 2014 at The Westin Bayshore. This patient is the 1,000th transcatheter heart valve (THV) procedure by the Centre for Heart Valve Innovation at SPH.

“The Centre for Heart Valve Innovation at St. Paul’s is recognized internationally as a pioneer of innovative, minimally invasive heart valve replacement procedures that provide an alternative for patients who are at higher risk for open-heart surgery,” said Dr. John Webb, Director of Interventional Cardiology at SPH. “By performing this surgery on patients that are awake, we can reduce the stress of surgery and increase options to reduce people’s risk, improve results and avoid complications, and allow patients to return home sooner.”

St. Paul’s Hospital is celebrating a milestone in a medical procedure it pioneered a decade ago. The procedure allows for the replacement of a patient’s heart valve, without open heart surgery, by using a catheter. The procedure is relatively painless, patients recover quickly, and many remain awake for the entire procedure. They are also able to go home one day after the operation. Today, the hospital performed that surgery for the 1,000th time, live on video to a large gathering of medical specialists in downtown Vancouver.