Interesting news from cardiologist

A few years ago my annual echocardiogram showed a mild amount of leakage around the outside of my aortic valve replacement. This is one fairly common complication.

Leaks cause regurgitation, which when part of the diastolic pressure when the valve is closed, leaks while the left ventricle fills. Because the condition is mild and asymptomatic, we went awaiting the affod. Recently my follow-up two years later showed that the situation has been advanced to moderate. It is still not necessary to do something because I am still asymptomatic, so we will check it again next year. If it progressed, I may have to perform a procedure. The minimal invasive approach is to go out of the groin with a plug through the femoral artery, which is comparable to an O-ring. This has around 70-90% success rate. The more invasive approach would be an open heart surgery, disable the first replacement valve and a new places. This has the advantage that valve technology has improved in two ways since I received mine in 2017. First, instead of a hard plastic ring on the outside, the outside cylinders can now stretch a little. This would be important if I ever had to get a new replacement in the future. Tavr! The second improvement is the valve material, beef in my case, is now being treated to prevent calcium accumulation, making the valve error less likely. An extensive report from Google Deep Research to the options is presented here. It seems that there is also extra imaging and other diagnostics that can be done to help choose which procedure. We will face that in a year or so if the situation progresses.

After I saw my doctor, I realized later that I might not be completely asymptomatic. Recently a few times, while I am very hard with long intervals, I have gotten a bit out of breath. That rarely happens to me cycling, usually it burns in the legs, so I withdrew, does not get out of breath. Getting out of breath is one of the symptoms of clay leakage. I will raise this with my cardiologist and see what he says. In the meantime, I will just avoid doing long hard intervals and following Clarence Bass’s advice to train long and easy or hard and short, or as Clarence says: “I walk or sprint, I don’t do anything in between”. I also told my cardiologist that I cycle on average about 90 minutes a day, plus to throw in some sprint training. He thinks that amount is fine for the time being. But I have to admit that I have been surpassed quite regularly lately. So I think I will cut until the amount that my cardiologist thinks it’s good.