Structural Heart Disease
Structural heart disease is an important area of cardiovascular therapy as more children with congenital heart disease (CHD) are surviving into adulthood and there is an increasing prevalence of pathologies affecting heart valves and large vessels. The treatment of structural heart disease is moving from traditional open heart surgery to minimally invasive keyhole procedures. These developments need new device technologies and imaging innovations to guide them. Patients will benefit substantially from new computational tools that can simulate the effects of therapy and allow an accurate assessment of risk versus benefit.
Within King’s Health Partners there are major industrial interactions with device companies around minimally invasive interventions for repair/replacement of mitral and aortic valves and setting up and delivery of educational programs such as PCR Valve London. In addition, there are industry interactions around better treatments for patients with adult congenital heart disease undergoing catheter-based interventional treatments. Finally, there are programs around aortic disease both in better understanding and treating arterial hypertension and in technologies for improving vascular surgical procedures such as aortic dissection and aneurysms.
Some of the key aims of this theme are:
- Integrate research databases into emerging clinical networks and pathways for valve disease.
- Deliver on ongoing clinical trials of new technological tools, devices and treatments for structural heart disease.
- Engage with clinical staff and GPs served to strengthen connections and the transfer of information.
- Develop and test new technologies to improve guidance of complex catheter-guided interventions of structural cardiovascular disease.
- Develop algorithms and indices for assessing cardiovascular function using pulse wave analysis and computational modelling in order to support minimally invasive keyhole procedures and complement imaging data.
- Develop new computational tools to simulate the effects of therapy in structural heart disease and assess risk versus benefit.
- Incorporate vascular disease into the theme when it has a cardiac effect e.g. arterial stiffening / stenosis, coarctation, hypertension.
- Establish a long-term protocol of early diagnosis and detection in GP centres for both valve disease and aortic disease leveraging new imaging technology and developed image analysis software.
- Engagement with CCGs and STPs to feed results into longer term clinical structures and business planning to improve care and reduce cost of management of patients with structural heart disease.