TAVR

French Hospital Medical Center is home to the first TAVR program and the most experienced team on the Central Coast.

Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement

Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement (TAVR) is a minimally invasive technique that can replace a diseased aortic valve in select patients without open heart surgery. TAVR:

  • Repairs a valve through a catheter without removing the old valve
  • Is an alternative to standard valve replacement surgery - no open heart procedure required
  • Generally results in faster recovery and shorter hospital stays
  • Is associated with less pain and faster return to physical activity than surgery
  • Has been associated with risks of death and stroke that are equal to or lower than surgical valve replacement
The Copeland, Forbes, and Rossi Cardiac Care Center has enabled cardiologists at French Hospital Medical Center  to perform Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacements (TAVR).   This breakthrough heart procedure allows heart specialists to place a new aortic valve in the beating heart through a small tube, or catheter, usually placed in a groin artery rather than with open heart surgery.   The catheter enables delivery of a collapsible replacement valve to the site of the narrowed valve. Once the new valve has been expanded, it pushes the old valve leaflets out of the way and the new valve takes over regulating blood flow.   Traditional surgical valve replacement requires surgically exposing and stopping the patient's heart through an open chest operation.  The TAVR procedure offers improvement in patient health and symptoms and can extend the lives of patients with severe aortic stenosis who are either inoperable or at high risk for surgery. 

French Hospital Medical Center was the first hospital along the Central Coast, south of Stanford and north of UCLA, to perform the innovative cardiac TAVR procedure.  In this first of its kind procedure on the Central Coast, interventional cardiologists, cardiac surgeons, and non-invasive imaging cardiologists work together as a team to perform the TAVR procedures. The TAVR "heart team" at French Hospital was formed and has been working together on TAVR patient selection and implantation more than four years.   These professionals have received extensive training and individually have decades of experience in treating heart disease.  The French Hospital TAVR program offers the latest generation of the TAVR heart  valve that has been implanted in more than 150,000 patients worldwide.

Prior to the FDA's approval of TAVR in 2011, patients with narrowed aortic valves who were considered to be high risk for surgery had limited options and faced a very poor prognosis.

Watch Our Informational HealthBreak Segment On TAVR

 

Learn More About Our TAVR Procedure

To learn more about our services and how we can help, please call us at (805) 542-6623. Patient packages on TAVR are available upon request.