“Two-year follow-up is ongoing. It really becomes very important that later this year or next year we’re going to have the results available for you to determine if the lower incidence of moderate or severe mitral regurgitation at 1 year translates into a net clinical benefit for patients undergoing CABG and mitral repair. This study has big implications for the practice of thoracic surgery and for how cardiologists refer patients,” according to Dr. Thourani.
The COAPT trial is randomizing patients with symptomatic functional mitral regurgitation and very high surgical risk to percutaneous catheter-based treatment with the MitraClip or to a standard-care control group. One-year outcomes will be presented in 2016, and follow-up out to 5 years is planned.
“You can see now that in cardiac surgery there’s a lot going on,” Dr. Thourani concluded. “It’s not only good for us, but it’s good for you. As a cardiovascular community, we need to work together more.”
He reported serving as a consultant to Edwards Lifesciences and St. Jude Medical and receiving research grants from Abbott Medical, Boston Scientific, Medtronic, and Sorin.