PARIS – The initial report from a large, prospective registry documenting outcomes in recipients of the Edwards Sapien 3 transcatheter aortic valve in real-world clinical practice confirm that the excellent results seen earlier in the rarified, randomized clinical trial setting are routinely reproducible in everyday practice, Dr. Olaf Wendler said at the annual congress of the European Association of Percutaneous Cardiovascular Interventions.
“The big thing with the Sapien 3 is the reduction in paravalvular leakage. Our rate of moderate or severe paravalvular leakage in the registry at 30 days is only 3.1%, with 73.6% of patients having no or only trace paravalvular leakage,” reported Dr. Wendler, professor of cardiothoracic surgery at King’s College Hospital, London.
Dr. Olaf Wendler
The mean gradient improved from 43.8 mm Hg at baseline to 11.7 mm Hg at discharge, while the effective orifice area climbed from 0.72 to 1.67 cm2.
He presented 30-day outcomes from the SOURCE 3 registry for 1,947 recipients of the Edwards Sapien 3 valve during transcatheter aortic valve replacement at 80 European centers in 10 countries. Their average age was 81.6 years. Updates will continue during a planned 5 years of prospective follow-up.
“This will be a very rich dataset for subgroup analyses. We now have a number of procedural variables we can analyze over time. We will have good data to get to better outcomes in terms of how best to perform the procedure if you do it with a Sapien valve,” he explained.
Among the key findings: The lower profile of the Sapien 3 delivery system, compared with earlier iterations of the Sapien valve, enabled 87% of patients in the registry to undergo TAVR via transfemoral access. And, in these 1,695 patients, whose mean logistic EuroSCORE was 17.8, the 30-day rates of all-cause mortality and disabling stroke were just 1.9% and 0.5%, respectively.
“I think there are not many series that have shown better results than these,” Dr. Wendler commented.
The non–transfemoral-access group is a very different, higher surgical risk cohort with lots more comorbid conditions. Their mean logistic EuroSCORE was 21.8. Yet in this group, the 30-day all-cause mortality and disabling stroke rates were still only 4% and 0.8%.
The transfemoral access group had markedly lower rates of life-threatening bleeding (4%), new-onset atrial fibrillation (4.8%), extended ventilation (3.5%), stage 2-3 acute kidney injury (0.8%), plus a 2-day shorter mean hospital length of stay.
Sixty percent of transfemoral access patients had their TAVR done under conscious sedation. These 1,018 patients constitute the largest dataset ever treated using conscious sedation with one valve system. The conscious sedation group had significantly lower baseline rates of carotid artery disease, prior coronary artery bypass graft surgery, and heart failure than did patients who received general anesthesia. At 30 days post-TAVR, the conscious sedation group had significantly lower rates of extended ventilation and postdilatation, and they received less contrast volume than did the general anesthesia group. However, they had a significantly higher incidence of stroke: 1.7%, compared with 0.6% for the general anesthesia group.
“Why that is the case we don’t know at the moment. We need to look into this more in the future,” the surgeon said.
A particularly impressive finding was how well Sapien 3 valve recipients with a low left ventricular ejection fraction have done. For example, 30-day all-cause mortality in the 100 patients with a baseline LVEF below 30% was 3%, not significantly different from the 1.8% rate in the 1,198 subjects with an LVEF greater than 50% or the 2.6% in patients with an LVEF of 30%-50%.
“Three percent all-cause mortality with an ejection fraction below 30% is just remarkable from my point of view,” Dr. Wendler said.
The 778 who didn’t undergo balloon aortic valvuloplasty prior to Sapien 3 implantation did not fare any worse than did those who did in terms of 30-day all-cause mortality or all strokes, but they did have significantly higher rates of life-threatening bleeding and major vascular complications.
The SOURCE 3 registry is sponsored by Edwards Lifesciences. Dr. Wendler serves as a consultant to the company.