Celebrating 2,400 Robotic Mitral Valve Surgeries

Announcer:

Welcome to Love Your Heart, brought to you by Cleveland Clinic's Sydell and Arnold Miller Family Heart, Vascular & Thoracic Institute. These podcasts will help you learn more about your heart, thoracic, and vascular systems, ways to stay healthy and information about diseases and treatment options. Enjoy.

Marc Gillinov:

I'm Dr. Marc Gillinov, Chair of the Department of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery at the Cleveland Clinic. Here in Cleveland, we're celebrating another banner year. I want to focus on one particular important area of interest for us, and that is robotic mitral valve surgery. This year we did our 2400th robotic mitral valve repair. This experience has been simply amazing for patients. The operative risk is less than one in a thousand, the mitral valve repair rate is 99.8% and patients are out of the hospital in three or four days with only small incisions on the side. They don't look like they had heart surgery. These days, we have many different approaches, ranging from catheter-based non-surgical approaches to robotic surgery to standard open heart surgery. It is very worthwhile to seek a second opinion if you're told you need heart surgery and you want to make sure that you've explored every available option so that you get what fits you. This has been an amazing journey and we are so pleased that we're able to provide this excellent, minimally invasive, quicker return to normal life approach for our patients with robotic mitral valve repair.

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