Mitral valve repair

In today's VetGirl podcast, we review a recent paper by Lee et al.

entitled Retrospective Evaluation of Transcatheter Edge-to-Edge Mitral Valve Repair in Dogs with Myxomatous Mitral Valve Disease, published in the Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine in 2025.

Given the high incidence of myxomatous mitral valve disease in dogs, especially those small dogs we all see... and the high degree of morbidity and mortality it can cause, efforts continue to focus on treatment strategies that can both delay the onset of symptomatic disease and prolong the overall survival of dogs who do develop clinical congestive heart failure.

Ultimately, all medical therapies currently employed to treat this disease can improve cardiac function and but do not address the primary underlying disease itself, namely valvular regurgitation secondary to thickening and prolapse.

Mitral valve repair is the standard of care in humans and has recently begun being performed in dogs in a limited number of veterinary institutions in Japan, Korea, Europe, and in the United States.

Although complications can occur, current success rates are reported to be high in both the short and long term.

The primary challenges with valve repair appear to be, one, the invasiveness and technical skill required to perform the procedure, which is open heart by nature.

exposure, but without getting too technical, severe critical mitral valve measurements are performed on echocardiogram to prepare for device selection, including things like hinge point to hinge point anterior-posterior diameter and anterior and posterior mitral valve lengths, among others.

We've got adding a CT scan for predictive scores of lung transplants, donor suitability, and we've got an amazing story about a robot that can take blood.

We've got three videos for you as well, mitral valve repair after a badly placed mitral clip.

We've got a video from me, how I took out a 10 centimeter anterior mediastinal mass, still minimally invasively, and a modified track door for reimplantation of al capa.

In addition to that, of course, we've got EAX coming up.

And he also said now he's back in Mainz, Germany as the head of minimum invasive cardiac surgery.

He was going to send us some interesting videos and he certainly did.

He has sent a great video of mitral valve repair after MitraClip.

This is a patient that was sent to him, 76 years old, quite a few comorbidities.