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Doctoring General Cardiology General Medicine

Small Clots on Replacement Aortic Valves Deserve Attention

A large study presented at last month’s American College of Cardiology meeting reported that slightly more than 1 in 10 patients with aortic valve replacements (tissue valve) had small clots on the leaflet of the new valve. The study included 890 patients. The clots, which doctors call “subclinical thrombosis,” cannot be seen on regular echo […]

Categories
Doctoring General Cardiology

Possible clot issue on replacement aortic valves slows momentum of TAVR

The next frontier in cardiology is the replacement of cardiac valves via catheters rather than open-chest surgery. This new branch of cardiology is called “structural” cardiology. Trainees do entire “structural” fellowships in which they learn to do things with catheters that surgeons once did with open chest techniques. You may have heard about TAVR–or transcatheter […]