Cardiologists Send Up a Trial Balloon in New Efforts To Relieve Heart Failure

Abstract

RELIEF OF HEART FAILURE symptoms in elderly patients with severe aortic or mitral stenosis is the aim of an expanding number of cardiologists performing percutaneous balloon valvuloplasty. At the recent meeting of the American Heart Association in Dallas, William Grossman, MD, Herman Dana Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Boston, reported on a group of 76 patients on whom the procedure was performed at Beth Israel Hospital, where he is chief of the Cardiovascular Division. Inspired by the work of a friend and colleague, pediatrician James E. Lock, MD, director of the Cardiac Catheterization Laboratory at Boston Children's Hospital, who had developed a method of opening stenotic mitral valves in children, Grossman started his research on postmortem hearts in July 1985 and first applied the treatment clinically on Oct 1 of that year. That patient, a 75-year-old man with severe mitral stenosis, and the second patient, a 93-year-old woman