Staged total percutaneous treatment of aortic valve pathology and mitral regurgitation: institutional experience.

OBJECTIVES: To summarize our single Institution experience with staged total percutaneous management of aorto-mitral pathology. BACKGROUND: Percutaneous treatment of aortic valve stenosis (AVS) and mitral valve regurgitation (MVR) has been recently proposed for patients at high surgical risk. METHODS: Data concerning consecutive patients undergoing percutaneous transcatheter AV implantation (TAVI) followed by MV repair with MitraClip® were prospectively collected and analyzed. RESULTS: From January 2010 to February 2012 a total of 254 patients were referred to undergo TAVI in our Institution. Seventeen (6.7%) had preoperative severe MVR that remained unchanged after TAVI. Due to exacerbation of symptoms 12 patients were subsequently submitted to MV repair with the MitraClip® device. Mean age was 79 years (72-86 years), median Ambler score was 30.1 (17.2-42.6) and EuroSCORE 22.3 (10.2-48.6). Procedural success rate was 100%. Postprocedural hospitalization was 7.1 ± 2.7 and 4.6 ± 0.9 days after TAVI and MV repair, respectively. Six months follow-up echocardiography confirms improvement in LV-EF (37.2 ± 9.9 vs. 43.5 ± 10.7, P < 0.0001). No patient presents MVR exceeding grade I(+) or prosthetic aortic insufficiency > I grade and all patients experienced an improvement in functional status. CONCLUSIONS: Percutaneous treatment of AVS and MVR is feasible and safe. A tailored approach should be considered to treat firstly the AVS and subsequently the MVR when severe MV dysfunction and symptoms persist. Short-term durability of this combined percutaneous approach seems encouraging and justifies the economical burden to treat patients that have no other option.

Multicenter stability of diffusion tensor imaging measures: a European clinical and physical phantom study.

Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) detects white matter damage in neuro-psychiatric disorders, but data on reliability of DTI measures across more than two scanners are still missing. In this study we assessed multicenter reproducibility of DTI acquisitions based on a physical phantom as well as brain scans across 16 scanners. In addition, we performed DTI scans in a group of 26 patients with clinically probable Alzheimer's disease (AD) and 12 healthy elderly controls at one single center. We determined the variability of fractional anisotropy (FA) measures using manually placed regions of interest as well as automated tract based spatial statistics and deformation based analysis. The coefficient of variation (CV) of FA was 6.9% for the physical phantom data. The mean CV across the multicenter brain scans was 14% for tract based statistics, and 29% for deformation based analysis. The degree of variation was higher in less organized fiber tracts. Our findings suggest that a clinical and physical phantom study involving more than two scanners is indispensable to detect potential sources of bias and to reliably estimate effect size in multicenter diagnostic trials using DTI.

Longitudinal changes in fiber tract integrity in healthy aging and mild cognitive impairment: a DTI follow-up study.

Cross-sectional studies using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) suggest decline of the integrity of intracortically projecting fiber tracts with aging and in neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease (AD). Longitudinal studies on the change of fiber tract integrity in normal and pathological aging are still rare. Here, we prospectively studied 11 healthy elderly subjects and 14 subjects with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a clinical risk group for AD, using high-resolution DTI and MRI at baseline and after 13 to 16 months follow-up. Fractional anisotropy (FA), a DTI measure of fiber tract integrity, was compared across time points and groups using a repeated measures linear model and tract based spatial statistics. Additionally, we determined rates of grey matter and white matter atrophy using automated deformation based morphometry. Healthy elderly subjects showed decline of FA in intracortical projecting fiber tracts, such as corpus callosum, superior longitudinal fasciculus, uncinate fasciculus, inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus, and cingulate bundle (p < 0.05, corrected for multiple comparisons). MCI subjects showed significant FA decline predominantly in the anterior corpus callosum (p < 0.05, corrected for multiple comparisons). Grey and white matter atrophy involved prefrontal, parietal, and temporal lobe areas in controls and prefrontal, cingulate, and parietal lobe areas in MCI subjects and agreed with the pattern of fiber tract changes. Our findings indicate that DTI allows detection of microstructural changes in subcortical fiber tracts over time that are related to aging as well as to early stages of AD type neurodegeneration. The underlying mechanisms for these changes are unknown.