Friday, March 4, 2011

interventional therapies may be able to improve cardiac function

Now almost a decade later, there is increasing talk, and I think rightly so, about how interventional therapies may be able to improve cardiac function and reverse heart failure. Examples abound, and include

(1) percutaneous cardiac assist device therapy to facilitate multi-vessel high-risk intervention and complete revascularization or as a bridge to recovery with reduced infarct size in acute myocardial infarction, with or without cardiogenic shock;
(2) percutaneous aortic and mitral valve repair and/or replacement to reverse or halt negative remodeling and improve cardiac output;
(3) stem cell and gene therapy delivery to improve ventricular function;
(4) cardiac resynchronization to improve stroke volume;
(5) atrial septal defect closure, paravalvular leak repair, and other advanced congenital defect treatment such as coarctation repair; and
(6) alcohol septal ablation for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy to reduce outflow tract obstruction and improve both mitral regurgitation and diastolic function.

Personally, I think the time has come for interventional cardiology to take its rightful place in the comprehensive and multi-disciplinary management of patients with heart failure.

So where do we go from here? I think we need to re-integrate advanced hemodynamics and heart failure management into the curriculum of interventional cardiology, and make sure we teach this science, including basic coronary and cardiovascular physiology, at all of our scientific sessions. Most importantly, though, we must start to work hand-in-hand with our heart failure, imaging, and electrophysiology colleagues to not only better understand what works, but in what sequence.

No comments: