July 27, 2021
MIAMI, FL—A debate at TVT 2021 last week was supposed to be about whether guideline-directed medical therapy should be tried at maximally tolerated doses before patients undergo transcatheter edge-to-edge repair (TEER) for functional mitral regurgitation (MR), but it ended up focusing on the difficulty of getting patients on foundational heart failure therapies in the first place.
JoAnn Lindenfeld, MD (Vanderbilt Heart and Vascular Institute, Nashville, TN), led off by arguing that drug therapy should be maxed out first, but her ostensible opponent didn’t disagree.
“I want to concede the debate to JoAnn. I think she made a convincing argument, and I really don’t have much to add to what she said,” Milton Packer, MD (Baylor Heart and Vascular Institute, Houston, TX), said.