The CDC defines severe obesity, or class III obesity, as any patient with a BMI of 40 or higher. TAVR among these patients is not associated with a lower survival rate, but it does lead to many more risks.
Heart teams can limit the risk of conduction disturbances that lead to permanent pacemaker implantation by utilizing both the cusp-overlap method and intracardiac echocardiography.
When patients with pacemakers die, what happens to the device? Typically, it ends up being discarded and forgotten—they were designed to be single-use devices, after all—but that does not have to be the case.