Interventional Heart Failure

Now almost a decade later, there is increasing talk, and I think rightly so, about how interventional therapies may be able to improve cardiac function and reverse heart failure. Examples abound, and include

(1) percutaneous cardiac assist device therapy to facilitate multi-vessel high-risk intervention and complete revascularization or as a bridge to recovery with reduced infarct size in acute myocardial infarction, with or without cardiogenic shock;

(2) percutaneous aortic and mitral valve repair and/or replacement to reverse or halt negative remodeling and improve cardiac output;

(3) stem cell and gene therapy delivery to improve ventricular function;

(4) cardiac resynchronization to improve stroke volume;

(5) atrial septal defect closure, paravalvular leak repair, and other advanced congenital defect treatment such as coarctation repair; and

(6) alcohol septal ablation for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy to reduce outflow tract obstruction and improve both mitral regurgitation and diastolic function.

Personally, I think the time has come for interventional cardiology to take its rightful place in the comprehensive and multi-disciplinary management of patients with heart failure. After all, heart failure is now the great epidemic, and remains primarily due to hypertension, valve or coronary disease. Indeed, while we’ve been “up to our necks” in coronary intervention for some time now, we are certainly now at least “knee deep” in valvular disease and at least “dipping our toes” into hypertension. Medications will remain a mainstay of heart failure management, and rightly so, but they should ideally be complementary to other forms of treatment that further unload the heart or reverse the primary disorder.