Optimizing Clinical Outcomes for Patients with Valvular Stenosis
In This Video
- Sammy Elmariah, MD, MPH, discusses his interest in helping patients with valvular heart disease, specifically severe aortic stenosis, get treatment early to improve outcomes and alleviate symptoms
- He aims to find the best timing for interventions so that patients can live longer and have relief from their symptoms
- He and his research team are interested in finding biomarkers by using metabolomic and proteomic techniques that can inform treatment decisions in patients with severe aortic stenosis
Sammy Elmariah, MD, MPH, director of Interventional Cardiology Research at Massachusetts General Hospital, has dedicated his research to helping patients with valvular heart disease, specifically aortic stenosis. He and his team are focused on finding biomarkers that can identify patients who would benefit from valve replacement therapies early to improve outcomes and alleviate symptoms.
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Transcript
So the major area of my focus is to optimize clinical outcomes for patients with valvular heart disease, specifically aortic stenosis. What we are learning is that when we wait too long in these patients, they end up having more outcomes, and so what we are hoping to do is to identify means of personalizing and optimizing the time of valve replacement therapies, where it be surgical valve replacement or transcatheter valve replacement. If we can perform these interventions in a timely manner, the hope is that we'll have the patients that live longer and hopefully get improved alleviation from their symptom status.
Most of our research is focused on the use of biomarkers to try to identify those patients who are earlier in their disease course, or again to find that golden moment when they would benefit from valve replacement but where it is not too late such that there is already irreversible injury to their heart muscle. My team is focused on the use of biomarkers and essentially, we are trying to identify the biomarkers that can inform treatment decisions in patients with severe aortic stenosis, and there are not many who are focused in this area. What we have applied is actually metabolomic and proteomic techniques, and we have already found markers that are indicative of the extent of myocardial injury, that are indicative of left ventricular ejection fraction, of left ventricular mass. Using these markers are essentially giving us a pathway to gain information and insight into the energies of the heart and the metabolism of the heart muscle. The next step is for us to determine if these biomarkers are actually predictive, if they predict what happens after the appropriate therapy is administered and if they can be leveraged in order to optimize clinical outcomes.
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