Aakriti Gupta explains use of cerebral embolic protection devices in TAVR

While stroke rates during transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) have greatly declined over the past decade, they remain a significant challenge. There were high hopes that cerebral embolic protection devices could help lower these rates, but the data have been mixed.

To find out where things are at with this technology, Cardiovascular Business spoke to Aakriti Gupta, MD, MSc, an assistant professor of interventional and structural cardiology at Cedars-Sinai and executive associate editor of the JACC journals, during the Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT) 2024 meeting.

"Stroke is a very important complication that occurs in the context of TAVR. When TAVR started, the stroke rate was in the range of 3.5 to 5%. Now we are down to about 2.5% in the last few years because of new iterations of the technology, operator experience and patient selection. So we've made a lot of progress, but I think the challenge is that we have plateaued in the 2.5% range," Gupta explained.

Her discussion focused on the ongoing debate regarding the effectiveness of cerebral embolic protection devices, particularly the Sentinel device, and emerging clinical data from large-scale trials.