German Aortic Valve Registry

1. Research aims The increasing prevalence of severe aortic valve defects is a corollary to increases in life expectancy. For many years, surgical valve replacement with extracorporeal circulation has been the gold standard in the treatment of severe aortic valve diseases. Every year, about 12,000 patients in Germany receive isolated aortic valve surgery. Several alternatives to established procedures have recently emerged: * V-TAVI, vascular transcatheter aortic valve implantation and * A-TAVI, apical transcatheter aortic valve implantation. For some time, percutaneous balloon valvuloplasty has been used as a palliative measure for specific patients. New developments have triggered assumptions that there will over the coming years be a certain reorientation to the treatment of patients with aortic valve defects. In a positioning paper published jointly by the German Cardiac Society (DGK) and the German Society for Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery (DGTHG), there is a consensus that these new techniques can be used on patients who have either contraindications against conventional surgery or who are at high risk of preoperative mortality, e.g. due to severe comorbidities. As there is as yet only limited experience in this field and neither randomised trials nor long-term-results are available, the use of new implantation techniques is therefore not recommended for younger patients or patients without comorbidities. There is accordingly an urgent need for any introduction of this innovative medical procedure to be stringently monitored according to scientific principles. The goal of the planned Germany Aortic Valve Register is to evaluate the new treatments from the point of view of benefits und risks with respect to the gold standard of conventional surgery, with a view to compiling evidence-based indication criteria. The register will furthermore allow for the first time a comparison of various operative procedures, such as Ross procedure, David