New procedure offers patients who can't undergo open heart surgery an alternative

PEORIA - Early in 2012 Gene Shurtz finally had to face facts - he had a heart problem.

"I was in denial. I thought I could manage my own body - I had never been in the hospital overnight prior to that," said Shurtz, 74, of East Peoria.

His first overnight hospital stay was the turning point.

"The doctor woke me up at 2 a.m. and said 'You're dying. Do you want to get up and help me save your life?' " said Shurtz. "My son even went and bought me a set of toy doctor's tools and said, 'If you're going to play doctor, you need a set of tools.' "

Shurtz was suffering from aortic stenosis, a condition in which the valve fails to open fully, obstructing the flow of oxygenated blood out of the heart. The condition can be caused by congenital factors or diseases, but often it's caused by calcium deposits on the valve, an issue that mostly affects older people.

Some 1.5 million people suffer from aortic stenosis, said Dr. Sudhir Mungee, an interventional cardiologist with HeartCare Midwest. About 500,000 of those patients have a very poor quality of life, suffering chest pain, shortness of breath and fainting spells, said Mungee. Fifty percent of patients suffering aortic stenosis and heart failure die within two years.

The only cure is to replace the aortic valve. Surgeons have been performing aortic valve replacement through open heart surgery since the late 1960s. But, the procedure requires a long period of recovery, and some patients can't endure it. By the time Shurtz admitted he needed help, he was no longer a candidate for open heart surgery.

"I was too sick. My heart wasn't strong enough," he said. Luckily for him, a new procedure was being performed at OSF Saint Francis Medical Center by physicians from HeartCare Midwest. On Dec. 11, Shurtz became the second person to have Transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) in Peoria.

Instead of opening the chest to replace the valve, with TAVR a new valve is implanted into the heart through an artery with a catheter. The procedure received FDA approval in December 2011, and has been performed in other countries for the past five years.

There have been 40,000 TAVR procedures performed world-wide this year and the procedure has about a 90-percent success rate, Mungee said.

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New procedure offers patients who can't undergo open heart surgery an alternative