JACKSONVILLE, Fla — Eliminating open heart surgery is a big goal. Doctors at Ascension St. Vincent’s in Jacksonville are making progress towards that goal with a big milestone.
Ascension St. Vincent's is celebrating 1,000 TAVR procedures which stands for transcatheter aortic valve replacements. In about the same time you can go grocery shopping, someone could get a new heart valve.
That someone was Ted Jackson in 2018. He was 79 years old and he underwent the TAVR procedure to replace his aortic valve.
“I walk a lot with my wife," Jackson said. "It got to the point where I couldn’t do more than 150 steps.”
Jackson says the doctor fixed his heart in about 45 minutes.
“Through a needle stick through a femoral artery in the leg, like a heart catherization, we put a tube and then we pass a wire across into the heart," said Dr. Samer Garas, an interventional cardiologist. "Over that wire, we pass the valve.”
Garas says they deploy the valve and they’re done. Jackson was back home the next day.
Garas says the aortic valve often needs to be replaced in the elderly, people over 70. Open heart surgery is much riskier at an older age. Garas says the TAVR procedure is also proving to have better outcomes for these patients than if they underwent open-heart surgery.
One in 8 adults born before 1943 will suffer from heart valve disease, according to Ascension St. Vincent's.
“The fact that they’ve developed this procedure, this technique, is a miracle," Jackson said. “In an hour of the procedure, I’m sitting up in the ICU drinking Starbucks.”
Garas says the milestone of 1,000 TAVRs means that their doctors are getting more efficient at the procedure.
“When we initially started doing the procedure, it would take 2-3 hours," Garas said. "Now almost all of our procedures are done in under 45 minutes.”
Garas wants people to be aware of this option because from according to the American Journal of Cardiology, from 2012 to 2019, there’s been about a 94% increase in aortic valve replacements.
Garas says a lot of it is due to the fact that our population is aging. He also said it is more common in the south where more of a population suffers from obesity and other health issues.