The team at the New England Heart & Vascular Institute at Catholic Medical Center (CMC) has performed a new, minimally-invasive surgery to treat patients with thoracic aortic disease. The Valiant Navion™ Stent Graft System is a stent graft that can be placed through a catheter into the thoracic aorta to treat aneurysms and other diseases of the aorta. CMC is the first hospital in New England to use this system since its approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in October.
“The Valiant Navion™ System is a smaller stent graft, which is especially helpful in treating female patients who have smaller blood vessels,” says cardiovascular surgeon David Caparrelli, MD, FACS. “Before this kind of technology, we would likely have to treat these patients with open surgery. In our first case, we were actually able to do two procedures at once.”
72-year-old Donna Heal received the first Valiant Navion™ System last month. “I felt so good that next day, after the surgery, “I told them I was ready to go home,” she says. In addition to having the Valiant Navion™ System, Heal had her aortic valve replaced, also through a catheter. Dr. Caparrelli and interventional cardiologist Fahad Gilani, MD, FACC, FSCAI performed the procedure in CMC’s Hybrid Operating Room.
“I had triple bypass nearly 20 years ago and they had to open up my chest. I wasn’t ready to go through that again but they told me this was going to be different,” she recalls. “I was a little leery but after I did it, I said ‘what a miracle this is!’”
The Valiant Navion™ System is a stent graft designed to repair an artery that is weakened by an aneurysm or a tear in the aorta. An aneurysm is an abnormal expansion of an artery that can be fatal if it ruptures.
“At CMC, we’re fortunate to be able to adopt many emerging technologies, such as the Valiant Navion™ System, to give patients the best recovery and outcomes possible,” says New England Heart & Vascular Institute Executive Medical Director Louis Fink, MD, FACC. “We’re able to offer patients more options than were available just a few years ago.”