Our experience
Part of Boston Children's Hospital's Heart Center, we treat the most common and most complex childhood heart diseases and disorders. Our team includes some of the world's most experienced Cardiologists and Surgeons, and allowing us to provide young children with heart conditions the best care possible.
Innovative care
The program specializes in caring for patients with common as well as very complex forms of heart valve disease. The limitations in the size of bioprosthetic mechanical valves, the degeneration of these valves over time, along with normal childhood growth, led us to establish a program aimed at developing novel solutions to the problems of young children and adults with valvular heart defects.
The Program creates a broad framework to advance our knowledge and management of all forms of heart valve disease, and thereby improving the longer-term quality of life for our patients.
As the field of congenital heart valve disease rapidly changes, the modalities of diagnosis and treatments advance. Historically, children who have heart valve conditions have had chronic problems that require lifelong follow-up and treatment.
Currently, few artificial replacement heart valves are available that are designed specifically for children, and therefore doctors are limited in their options. Further complicating matters is the fact that when surgeons place a new valve in a child, it doesn't grow as the child grows, so it needs to be replaced over time.
To address these problems, Children's Cardiac Surgery research team are exploring ways to reconstruct children's existing valves. Unlike replacement valves, a reconstructed valve can last a long time and give children an optimal quality of life.
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