Heart valve replacement is a complex, last-resort, surgical procedure aimed at removing faulty or damaged heart valves and replacing them with either a mechanical or a biologic valve. Cleveland Clinic describes the procedure as removing the patient's own valve and sewing the mechanical or biological valve in place. Heart valve replacement is only resorted to when the faulty valve interferes greatly with the pumping capacity of the heart and when valve repair is not possible. For patients with these problems, heart valve replacement offers many advantages.
Improvement in Symptoms
Patients living with faulty valves experience a multitude of uncomfortable and sometimes even incapacitating symptoms. The Merck Manuals Online Medical Library lists a few of these such as chest pain, shortness of breath, faintness and palpitations. The British Heart Foundation asserts that most patients who undergo heart valve replacement have markedly improved symptoms and can go about their lives almost normally without many of the previous limitations imposed on them by their condition.
Avoiding Complications
Patients with long-standing valvular disease may suffer from heart failure as a complication. A common clinical situation, recounted by the Manuals Online Medical Library, in which this occurs is when patients suffer from narrowing of the aortic valve, known as aortic stenosis. This valve is the gateway to the aorta, the body's main artery and blood supplier. The left ventricle, the heart's main pumping chamber, pumps the blood through the aortic valve. As this valve is narrowed, the left ventricle's job becomes much harder. Its muscle becomes thicker, and then, unable to compensate for the increased workload, it fails. Early heart valve replacement surgery reduces this risk of heart failure.
Durability
Traditionally, biological valves were considered less durable than their mechanical counterparts. This is in comparison to mechanical valves which were considered to offer the patient durability at the expense of the inconvenience of having to take blood-thinning medication for life. As reported by the Cleveland Clinic, however, there is a new type of durable biological valves made from the sheath covering the bovine heart. These cow-heart biological valves owe their durability to the tissue from the cow's heart and to the sophisticated bioengineered material added to this particular biological valve.
