Imagine your heart not functioning properly and you not knowing for years! That’s the reality of people with aortic valve disease.
Symptoms include chest pain, dizziness, fatigue, and irregular heartbeat. If the disease is above a mild or moderate state, the only option has been surgery.
But now there’s a new option.
When your aortic heart valve stops working, it puts you at risk for heart failure and stroke.
Standard surgery involves big chest incisions, which can have painful recoveries. But Cleveland Clinic has a new option called transcervical robotic aortic valve replacement.
“This is the first open heart surgery that we do that does not require any major incisions on a chest wall. And it basically only involves an incision on the lower neck with some small, less than a centimeter incisions on a chest wall that are pretty much healable on its own,” explained Dr. Marijan Koprivanac, a staff physician at Cleveland Clinic.
This surgery is assisted by a robot that is big on the outside but precise inside the body.
“Everything that robot is doing is what I do with my own hands just extended,” described Koprivanac.
Using the robot, the surgeons put the patient on a heart-lung machine to take out the old valve and put the new valve in.
“This way, there is no cutting of the ribs, there is no cutting of the sternum, there is no cutting or spreading of the chest wall at all. So, when patients breathe and cough, there is pretty much no increase in pain,” Koprivanac told Ivanhoe.
He says any pain can be taken care of with ibuprofen or Tylenol.
“Technically, as I tell all of my patients, they can go next day or not next day, next week back to normal activity and just go back to normal life,” said Koprivanac.
Getting you out of the hospital and back to your normal life quicker, which is what we all want.
Currently, Cleveland Clinic is the only place to get this procedure and they just started offering it in 2025. Koprivanac says he hopes this new procedure becomes the new standard of care in the future.