Similar safety after TAVR, surgery in lower-risk ‘real-world’ patients

For patients at low-to-intermediate risk, transfemoral TAVR is a safe alternative to surgery, with comparable survival at 1 year, according to a large registry study.
For the OBSERVANT trial, Marco Barbanti, MD, of Ferrarotto Hospital (Catania, Italy), and colleagues looked at 7,618 Italian patients with aortic stenosis and low-to-intermediate surgical risk who underwent either surgery (n = 5,707) or TAVR (n = 1,911) between 2010 and 2012.
Patients were propensity-matched into 650 pairs, although surgically-treated patients still had slightly higher levels of albumin and hemoglobin and the TAVR group