Clinical Medicine Insights: Cardiology

Patients with severe aortic stenosis are sometimes not candidates for conventional open heart surgery because of severe deconditioning, excessive risk factors, and multiple comorbidities. Transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) is a relatively recent intervention, which was initially addressed to individuals with severe symptomatic aortic stenosis at substantial or prohibitive surgical risk. Despite the documented beneficial effects of this therapeutic intervention in certain carefully selected individuals, it has not yet been applied to lower risk patients. This is a review of the current literature and accumulated clinical data of this rapidly evolving invasive procedure in an attempt to resolve whether it can now be applied to a wider portion of patients with aortic stenosis.