We walk you through the process of repairing the mitral valve, which sometimes is necessary when its leaflets becomes floppy, or slip too far out of place. When that happens, the faulty valve allows blood to leak (regurgitate), back into your heart's left atrium. The most common symptoms are shortness of breath and sometimes feeling tired as well.
Mitral Valve Regurgitation
This condition - impacting about four million people in the United States each year - makes the heart work harder at pushing blood through the body, leading to shortness of breath, fatigue and worsening heart failure.
The MitraClip procedure involves implanting the device into the femoral vein near the groin, and then guiding it to the heart, which attaches to the mitral valve leaflets. The MitraClip procedure is offered at Nebraska Medicine as alternatives for patients considered too frail for traditional open heart surgery, and is often performed on patients in their 80s or 90s.
Patient Guides
Why Nebraska Medicine to Solve Your Mitral Valve Regurgitation?
Minimally Invasive Option
The procedure involves a small incision, not open heart surgery. This leads to less blood loss, scarring and less of a chance of infection, while speeding up recovery time. The surgical team watches in real time to make sure the mitral regurgitation was appropriately reduced.
Expertise
This procedure to prepare a valve that needs to open and shut thousands of times each day is so technical that hospitals are encouraged by experts in this procedure to do at least 10 or more a year, just to keep in practice. Nebraska Medicine is one of the few centers with a team that does the procedure often enough to easily meet that guideline, with a 100% success rate.
Fewer Logistical Hassles
In one visit you may meet with a cardiologist, a surgeon who specializes in surgeries of the heart, and a surgeon whose focus is on procedures involving catheters and valves.