SAN DIEGO — General and local anesthesia are comparably safe and effective during transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) procedures, according to the first randomized trial to compare the two approaches.

Compared to heart failure patients with severe secondary mitral regurgitation who were treated with guideline-directed medical therapy alone, those randomized to a MitraClip procedure plus optimal medical therapy demonstrated relative reductions of 47 percent for heart failure hospitalizations and 38 percent for mortality at two years of follow-up.

Sustained elevated blood pressure can increase a patient’s risk for both aortic valve stenosis and aortic regurgitation, according to an analysis of 5.4 million non-CVD patients in the U.K.

Minimally invasive cardiac surgery without peripheral cannulation is both safe and effective for correcting a wide range of congenital heart defects, including mitral valve repair and pulmonary stenosis, according to research published in Heart, Lung and Circulation this week.

Research out of Australia suggests newborns with congenital heart disease (CHD) are likely to have enlarged kidneys at birth—a finding that could help alert physicians to organ abnormalities before a child is born.

Early discharge following TAVR is associated with fewer readmissions and similar mortality over the following 30 days compared with a standard discharge strategy, according to a meta-analysis published in JACC: Cardiovascular Interventions.

Mothers or infants experienced no adverse cardiac events during 24 pregnancies completed by women who had undergone an arterial switch operation, according to a single-center, retrospective study published online Sept. 5 in JAMA Cardiology.

A learning curve of at least 225 procedures is required for hospitals to perform transcatheter aortic valve replacements (TAVRs) with the lowest mortality rates, suggests a study of 16 centers participating in an international registry.