We are committed to repairing your own mitral valve whenever possible with the least amount of pain, and with techniques allowing the quickest return to normal activities. Repair of you own mitral valve is better than replacing it with an artificial valve in many ways. When your own valve is repaired rather than replaced you can often avoid being placed on a blood thinner (warfarin) for life. Being able to avoid being on this blood thinner for a long period of time will lower your chances of having a bleeding problem. Patients with a repaired mitral valve also have a better short and long term survival when compared to patients with replaced mitral valves (See the article Very Long-Term Survival and Durability of Mitral Valve Repair for Mitral Valve Prolapse).

Our hospital survival rate following minimally invasive mitral valve repair is 100%. Our rate of stroke is 0%. The occurrence of a wound infection has been 0%. One hundred percent of the patient’s having a Minimally Invasive Mitral Repair by our group have had a successful repair-none required an artificial valve replacement. We have had similar outcomes following mitral valve repair using a sternal chest incision. In this sternotomy group 100% of patients have survived to be discharged from the hospital with a 0% death rate over the last 9 years (Dr McCullough’s personal series).

There are several ways to approach or get to your mitral valve to repair it. Some of these techniques have been called Minimally Invasive. In basic terms, surgeons can reach your mitral valve either through an opening down the middle of your chest dividing and spreading apart your breast bone, or through the side of your chest. The opening or incision down the middle of your chest is called a sternotomy and requires sawing through your breast bone. Fortunately the surgeons of Englewood Cardiac Surgical Associates can now repair most leaking (or regurgitant) mitral valves through a truly Minimally Invasive, very small incision under your right breast. (See the article Helping Heart Patients).

Our technique, called Port Access, takes advantage of the natural space between your ribs to avoid sawing through any bones and therefore decreasing the pain of the surgery. This Port Access operation results in the least amount of damage to your body allowing for faster recovery times and earlier return to all normal activities as well as less pain.

The small incision has the cosmetic advantage of being hidden under the breast tissue in female patients.

The Port Access operation is better than robotic assisted operations because the same or smaller incisions are used in our operation and the surgeon maintains direct control over the instruments rather than working through a machine. During robotic assisted cardiac surgery a machine is holding the instruments that actually go inside your heart during part of the operation. Other teams have used partial sternal incisions or smaller skin incisions while making the cut through the breast bone as their minimally invasive approach. We feel the Port Access approach is superior to all the midline incisions through the breast bone because Port Access almost completely avoids the devastating problem of a severe infection of the breast bone called mediastinitis and/or sternal osteomyelitis. These severe infections can result in a very long hospital stay, multiple operations to repair and a long course of intravenous antibiotics with a significant scar- all these problems are nearly eliminated by the Port Access approach.