Heart Valve Disorders
Heart valve disease happens if one or more of your heart valves don’t work well. Many things can cause one or more of your heart valves to not open fully or to let blood leak backward into the heart chambers: birth defects, age-related changes, infections, or other conditions. Whatever the cause, valve disease can make your heart work harder and affect its ability to pump blood.
What is a valve disorder?
Heart valves can have three basic kinds of problems:
Regurgitation (re-GUR-jih-TA-shun): The valve doesn’t close tightly. Instead of flowing forward through the heart or into an artery, blood leaks back into the chambers.
Stenosis (ste-NO-sis): The flap of a valve thickens, stiffens, or fuses together, preventing the heart valve from fully opening.
Atresia (a-TRE-ze-ah): The heart valve doesn’t have an opening for blood to pass through.
Some people are born with heart valve disease (that’s called “congenital” heart valve disease), while others get it later in life. Both kinds of heart valve disease can cause stenosis or backflow.
What are the symptoms of a valve disorder?
Lots of people have heart valve defects or disease but don’t have symptoms. For others, heart valve disease gets worse over time until symptoms develop. These symptoms can include: chest pain, tiredness, shortness of breath and/or light-headedness.
How are valve disorders diagnosed?
Malfunctioning valves sometimes create abnormal sounds, or murmurs, that can be heard through a doctor’s stethoscope. Physical exam, medical history and tests such as exercise stress tests, chest X-ray, CT scan, cardiac catheterization and heart MRI can help your doctor understand what is going on with your heart valves.
What are treatments for heart valve disorders?
Unfortunately, there are no medicines that can cure heart valve disease. Medicines can often successfully treat symptoms and delay problems for many years. So can lifestyle changes like eating a healthy diet, quitting smoking, and getting regular exercise. Eventually, you may need surgery to repair or replace a faulty heart valve.
When a diseased heart valve needs treatment, the available choices are valve repair or valve replacement:
- Valve repair preserves the valve and its leaflets. Repair can require extensive surgery, or a minimally invasive procedure such as Mitral Clip for those who can’t tolerate surgery. Repair is most often possible for mitral valve regurgitation and tricuspid valve regurgitation.
- Valve replacement may include TAVR or other minimally invasive procedure. In many cases, the best long-term solution may require a more involved surgery such as the Ross procedure or the insertion of a new tissue or manufactured valve.
- Catheter-based. The most common heart valve disease, mitral regurgitation, is usually treated with open-heart valve replacement surgery, however, some patients are not healthy enough to tolerate surgery.