Active clinical trials for "Heart Valve Diseases"

Older and more frail adults are more often being referred for cardiac surgery. These patients are often in suboptimal health, and may be physically frail, malnourished, and have other conditions, such as diabetes, that complicate their recovery. Research suggests that a rehabilitation program prior to surgery may help improve participants' health and improve their fitness for surgery. Currently, a pre-operative rehabilitation workshop is offered at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute, but this interventional, randomized study will investigate whether a more comprehensive pre-operative regime, including structured weekly exercise program, is more effective at improving health prior to surgery. Patients will be randomized to either the control group (pre-operative rehabilitation workshop ONLY) or the treatment group (pre-operative rehabilitation workshop plus exercise regime). This regime will attempt to improve patients' overall health, including their physical fitness and nutritional status. The effectiveness of this regime will be evaluated by comparing patients' physical function, questionnaires (diet, quality of life, stress) and serum biomarkers from baseline to pre-surgery to post-surgery. The Investigators hypothesize that patients that complete the pre-operative rehabilitation program will improve their health prior to surgery, and that this may result in shorter length of hospitalization and fewer complications after surgery. The study will take place over two years, with each patient's participation lasting about 3 months.

XueBiJing, a Chinese herbal derived therapeutic, has been approved to treat severe infections (sepsis) in critically ill patients (China Food and Drug Administration; Beijing, China, Number Z20040033). Cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB) will produce large amounts of inflammatory mediators and oxygen free radicals, which causes the lipid peroxidation damage and mononuclear cell migration, thus aggravating organ inflammation and damage. Therefore, exploring new methods to prevent and alleviate organ injury caused by CPB is an important topi in clinical practice. However, little knowledge is regarding the effect of Xuebijing injection on CPB-related organ injury. To answer these questions, the authors conducted this randomized trial to compare XueBiJing with placebo in critically ill patients with cardiovascular surgery.

Aortic stenosis (AS) is the most common valve disease among the adult population, in the majority of the cases it only requires treatment in advanced age. Transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) has become available as an alternative treatment for very high risk or even inoperative patients who are suffering from symptomatic aortic stenosis. Until now it has been learnt that there are group of patients who are in a very bad condition and who are so frail that they do not benefit from TAVI. These patients have worse survival rate and more importantly poor quality of life in spite of a successful procedure. Cardiac surgery risk scores like Society of Thoracic surgery score (STS) and EUROSCORE are less accurate in aging high risk people. In elderly it is principal to make differentiation between utility and futility. On the other hand, beside frailty status the main barrier to TAVI is the risk of neurological impairment. Neurological injury and impairment in TAVI can occur as cerebrovascular event (CVE) and/or neurocognitive dysfunction. The two neurocognitive dysfunctions - post-operative delirium (POD) and post-operative cognitive dysfunction (POCD). Most cases remain undetected although clinically could be apparent or silent. The neurological injury can be observed and/or detected by neuroimaging techniques and cognitive trajectories. A well established and validated frailty score based on relatively simple and feasible tests could help in our everyday practice to evaluate the prognosis of elderly people undergoing TAVI and to determine those patients who really benefit from the procedure.

Strategies for myocardial protection during open heart surgeries are desired. Several experimental studies have shown beneficial effects of remote ischemic preconditioning (RIPC). The underlying mechanisms are not totally understood. This study intends to evaluate molecular mechanisms involved with RIPC on myocardium of patients underwent open heart surgeries.

The primary objective of this study is to evaluate the rate of deep sternal wound infection at 30 days post-operative following a full median sternotomy in patients treated with SternaLock Blu for rigid sternal fixation. This study will also provide evidence of the clinical performance of SternaLock Blu for up to 90 days using real world evidence methodology. Sternal complications will be reported through 90 days follow up.

The purpose of this study is to determine whether a new cerebral oxygenation monitoring device is comparatively similar to the current approved devices.

Conventional cardiac operations are performed with median sternotomy, which is related to great wound, morbidities, longer duration in hospital and most significantly, cosmetic problems. The investigators invested a new minimally invasive cardiac operation method totally under video-endoscope and peripheral cardiopulmonary bypass. The investigators' hypothesis is that this new minimally method could provide better cosmetic effects to the patients, and also relate to shorter postoperative hospital stay and better recovery.

The prevalence of valvular heart disease is on the rise along with the aging society and the generalization of echocardiography. Furthermore, the rheumatic valvular heart disease is much more prevalent in Asia than in Western countries, and the frequency of valve disease is higher in Asia. The effect of an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) in the primary prevention of sudden cardiac death in ischemic cardiomyopathy is well established and has become a standard of care. However, there is limited research on the effect of ICD implantation for primary prevention in patients with heart failure due to valvular heart disease. In a small study, the incidence of fatal cardiac arrhythmia was lower in patients with valvular cardiomyopathy (5%) who received ICD implantation for primary prevention than in those with ischemic cardiomyopathy. But there is also a report that the appropriate ICD treatment is not different from that of ischemic heart disease in valvular heart disease patients. Therefore, it is necessary to study the primary prevention effect of ICD on valvular cardiomyopathy in a larger number of patients. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of ICD on the prevention of sudden cardiac death in patients with heart failure due to valvular heart disease through prospective, multicenter, and observational studies.

First-in-Human clinical investigation to evaluate the safety and clinical performance of the BIOVALVE prosthesis in subjects presenting with severe symptomatic aortic valve stenosis, which are as judged by the heart team, indicated for transfemoral transcatheter aortic valve implantation

The recent developments of research on iPS (induced pluripotent stem) cells lead to the establishment of mature cell lines such as cardiomyocytes or valvular interstitial cells with genetic and cellular characteristics of the donors. These cells represent a biological material more readily available to identify the pathophysiological mechanisms involved in the diseases of BrS or ERS patients, which will lead to the identification of genetic markers.