Last month, the FDA approved TAVR, a heart surgery that is gaining momentum and was recently used for celebrity Mick Jagger, for low-risk patients.
TAVR, or transcatheter aortic valve replacement, is a procedure that’s less invasive than open-heart surgery.
It was only open to intermediate and high-risk patients until August of 2019, when the FDA approved it for low-risk patients as well.
Dr. Kenneth Jutzy is a cardiologist with Loma Linda University Health.
Jutzy: “The original trials were only on high-risk or inoperable patients and it was found to be equivalent to those patients and then they extended it to intermediate and now the latest trials show that it's at least as good and in some ways superior to surgery in low-risk patients.”
Currently, Loma Linda University International Heart Institute has done about 450 of these surgeries.
TAVR recently opened up in LLU’s Murrieta center and has had almost 100 patients.