A Minimally Invasive Valve Swap Gave Heart Failure Patients Another Option

November 1 — According to Xinhua today, a study led by Professor Zhang Junjie and Professor Chen Shaoliang’s team in the cardiology department of Nanjing First Hospital used a new minimally invasive procedure to treat heart failure patients. The results were published on 31 October in the journal Circulation.

The heart is the body’s engine, and the heart valves are the valves on that engine. If a valve fails to close properly for a long time, the heart can slip into failure. For heart failure patients with a leaking valve who could not undergo open-chest surgery, the only option used to be drugs to slow the disease. Now there is another possibility: replacing the valve with a minimally invasive procedure.

The study shows that after minimally invasive valve replacement, patients spent less time in hospital and had a better quality of life.

From June 2021 to May 2025, the team worked with 18 hospitals nationwide and enrolled 210 patients with severe aortic regurgitation and heart failure. Local medical teams judged that these patients were unsuitable for open-chest surgery, or the patients themselves declined it because of the risk.

The team used a new minimally invasive approach — transcatheter aortic valve replacement through the femoral artery. There is no chest opening, no sawing through ribs and the heart does not stop: doctors puncture a blood vessel at the top of the patient’s thigh and guide a compressed artificial valve along it to the heart, where it is released in place. Most patients can get out of bed within a day or two.

After a year of follow-up, the team found that patients’ heart function and daily condition had improved markedly. In the six-minute walk test, patients in the minimally invasive group walked noticeably further than those treated with drugs alone.