These are things that I think the average person can’t believe are feasible in 2017,” said Wood, who practises at Vancouver General Hospital and St. Paul’s Hospital in the same city. “Once you start getting symptoms, 50 per cent of people are going to be dead within a year so it’s absolutely imperative that you fix that valve,” Wood said. “By doing less, actually the patients did better,” he said of their work done at the Centre for Heart Valve Innovation involving St. Paul’s, VGH and the University of British Columbia. Max Morton, 79, was the first person to have the procedure as an emergency-room patient at Vancouver General Hospital. He’d already had open heart surgery a decade earlier.

Source: National Post October 30, 2017 21:30 UTC