Harold Schoendorf and Kenneth Horstmyer, both in their eighties, and both underwent aortic valve replacement.

"The next morning both of these guys are sitting up reading the newspaper asking when can they go home," says Cardiologist Dr. Alan Heldman.

Their remarkably quick recoveries due to an investigational and promising new procedure.

"What we are doing is new method of pushing the old valve aside and putting the new valve inside the old valve so that heart surgery is not necessary and so they don't have to have open heart surgery with the chest open and they don't have to be placed on cardiac bypass," says Cardiologist Dr. William O’Neill

Both men had severe aortic stenosis a common problem in the elderly.

"I was extremely fatigued and that was the issue with me, the tiredness," says Horstmyer.

"If I exerted myself in any way physically, two flights of stairs would do it, with groceries, forget it," says Schoendorf

It’s a two hour long procedure, under general anesthesia. Through a small incision in the leg, a balloon is threaded into the heart to open the diseased valve then another catheter is used to put this device in place.

"The new device is inside the old valve that the patient was born with," says Dr. Heldman.
For now this is only being tested in patients for whom tradition valve surgery would be too risky. Dr. William O'Neill was the first to perform this procedure in the United States.

"It's still too early to say that this is going to be a replacement for heart surgery, but we expect that probably within 10 years most patients with aortic stenosis are going to be treated with this procedure rather than valve replacement surgery," says Dr. O’Neill.