Atrium Health officials announced Wednesday that their surgeons successfully performed a new procedure on a patient suffering from a valve disease. The surgery was a first for the Carolinas. The valve disease is tricuspid regurgitation, or TR. The disease is a condition in which the valve located between the heart’s top and bottom chambers does not close, causing the blood to flow backward.
At least 5% of Americans suffer from the disease, according to the American Health Association, and can experience shortness of breath or swelling of the stomach and legs. Many cannot have open heart corrective surgery due to age or other factors. This new procedure gives them a treatment option. It involves inserting a catheter in the patient’s vein and using advanced imaging to implant a clip device in the heart to improve blood flow. Atrium Health Sanger Heart & Vascular Institute cardiologist Dr. Michael Rinaldi, who led the team that performed the surgery describes the patient and the procedure.
“This was a patient with shortness of breath related to severe tricuspid insufficiency and not a great surgical candidate,” Rinaldi said in a video provided by Atrium. “Medications were not doing the trick for him and we were able to offer a device and to a large extent almost eliminate the leakiness and this has been shown in clinical trials that we were a part of to improve quality of life substantially.”
Rinaldi says the clinical trial was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
“That trial showed (that using) the clip compared to not using a clip in a randomized trial improved quality of life substantially. That means patients were less short of breath, able to be more active, less swelling in their legs and belly,” Rinaldi said. “This is an exciting day for our team and patients.”
Until last month, when the FDA approved the clip device used in the surgery, there were limited TR treatment options. Atrium officials say patients can expect to go home the day after the procedure and see their symptoms resolved quickly. They say it is one of the first medical facilities in the country to commercially perform the tricuspid clip procedure.
