Last year marked the 50th anniversary of the first reported successful surgical treatment of cardiac valvular disease, and in that half-century, surgeons have come to own this practice area. Twenty years ago, however, interventional cardiologists fired the initial shots across the surgeons' bows when the first balloon aortic valvuloplasty procedure was performed. Surgeons remained largely unthreatened, because many patients who underwent these early interventional procedures suffered from early valve restenosis within one year of the procedure.
It took cardiologists a while to launch another attempt at interventional heart valve treatment, and in 2002, the first aortic...
