Does surgical therapy provide good long-term outcomes in patients with symptomatic hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy?
Surgical therapy for symptomatic HOCM provides good long-term outcomes and can serve as a standard for comparing newer, less invasive techniques like alcohol septal ablation.
We have examined the outcome of a large series of patients treated surgically for HOCM since 1963. The majority of patients were in NYHA class III and came to surgery after long-term medical, but finally insufficient, management. The perioperative risk could be reduced considerably during recent years, despite the advanced cardiomyopathy status. The long-term postoperative observation of the patients demonstrated an unexpectedly continuing good outcome. Therefore these results may serve as a standard for assessing the results after the less invasive alcohol-induced transcoronary ablation of septal hypertrophy.
Schulte et al. (Sun,) studied this question.