“Learning curve and procedural volume in mitral valve disease”

The impact of procedural volume on outcome results is a widespread topic in surgery, The importance of referral centers and high-volume hospitals have reached the forefront, particularly in mitral valve surgery, impacting the recommendations of the latest European and American guidelines. In this issue, Wayne et al. presented an interesting analysis of the relationship between surgeon and hospital procedural volume, mitral valve repair rates, and 30-day mortality for degenerative mitral regurgitation (MR) in Australia. Based on the database of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Cardiac and Thoracic Surgeons, they have shown how the surgeon and hospital caseload are significantly associated with repair rates of degenerative MR. This study reaches the same results presented by Chikwe et al. and others and corroborates what guidelines reported about the need for referral centers for mitral valve disease. These results are the reasons why many surgeons, as Adams et al., published papers to highlight the importance of a minimum mitral valve surgery volume threshold to achieve optimum results and discourage at the same time low-volume centers. The concept of minimum thresholds in mitral surgery suggested by Wayne et al. and previously by Vassileva et al. is fundamental to guarantee periprocedural safety, accuracy, and a high rate of reparation. Moreover, not only hospital volume but also surgeon yearly number of mitral valve interventions are crucial in valve repair rate and the threshold of 20 mitral procedures per year, proposed by Wayne et al., seems absolutely consistent with the literature.