Treatment Options

"Here at Mount Sinai Fuster Heart Hospital, we give people the most current information about their disease and treatment options,” says David H. Adams, MD, Cardiac Surgeon-in-Chief, Mount Sinai Health System, Marie Josée and Henry R. Kravis Professor and Chairman of Cardiovascular Surgery, and Program Director of the Mitral Valve Repair Reference Center at The Mount Sinai Hospital. "We offer the best technical expertise and medical care for valve repair surgery."

Mount Sinai Fuster Heart Hospital cardiologists diagnose heart valve disease after performing complete physical exams, echocardiographs, and electrocardiograms. If your heart valve disease is mild and does not restrict your activity, we may not need to do anything other than monitor you regularly. But if you have developed shortness of breath or congestive heart failure, medication, non-surgical, or surgical interventions may be recommended.

If medications and other non-surgical interventions don’t work, your physician may want to perform cardiac surgery to repair or replace the heart valve. Mount Sinai Fuster Heart Hospital has built an internationally renowned valvular heart disease surgical team. Our success rates and performance records attract patients from all over the world. Our experts take a proactive approach to assessing patients for heart valve repair or replacement surgeries and while we do not rush into surgery, may counsel against waiting for symptoms to worsen.

Deciding when to perform valve surgery depends on a combination of factors:

• Amount of regurgitation, or blood flowing back into the atrium
• Function of the affected portions of the heart
• Size of the heart chambers
• Presence of atrial fibrillation, a type of abnormal heart rhythm
• Symptoms of pulmonary hypertension or elevated blood pressure in the arteries supplying the lungs

Surgical Options

At Mount Sinai Fuster Heart Hospital, we try, whenever possible, to repair—rather than replace—heart valves. Both the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology recommend valvular repair over replacement. Both groups state that the surgery should be performed in a high-volume hospital, like The Mount Sinai Hospital, where surgeons have the highest level of experience.