In April 2018, the Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) Heart & Vascular Center became the first in New England to perform their 1,000th transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) procedure.
This milestone comes on the 95th anniversary of the world’s first-ever heart valve operation performed in 1923 by Dr. Eliot Cutler at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital (today, BWH). And it is a mere 22 years since BWH’s Dr. Lawrence H. Cohn performed the first minimally invasive heart valve surgery in 1996.
One of largest TAVR programs in New England, the Heart and Vascular Center participated in all three of the PARTNER randomized controlled trials that evaluated the Sapien TAVR valves beginning in 2009.
The success of the TAVR program is the result of multidisciplinary collaboration among physicians, surgeons, technologists, nurses, and research and administrative staff.
