What are the incidence, temporal trends, and clinical impact of vascular and bleeding complications in patients undergoing transfemoral TAVR?
While vascular and bleeding complications after transfemoral TAVR are declining, they remain associated with increased mortality, highlighting the need for smaller sheaths and optimized antithrombotic therapy.
In patients undergoing transcatheter aortic valve replacement in the US, vascular complications and in-hospital bleeding events were common, but rates have declined over time with significant variation in complication rates across hospital sites. Vascular and bleeding complications are both associated with worse short- and long-term clinical outcomes including all-cause mortality. Further innovation to reduce sheath sizes and optimize antithrombotic therapy is necessary to reduce the incidence of these detrimental complications.
Sherwood et al. (Wed,) studied this question.