According to a study published on Sunday in The Lancet, a minimally invasive surgery to replace the aortic valve has better results than patients who did not have surgery at all. The study stated that the patients who were once considered too sick for aortic valve replacement surgery have been living longer life after a minimally invasive surgery than the patients who did not undergo the surgery.

Aortic stenosis is the most common heart valve disease in which aortic valve decreases blood flow from the heart. Options to fix the issue were present throughout the 80s and 90s, but several patients, who were having the disease, were considered too sick to undergo the rigorous surgery. Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement (TAVR) then became an option. During the new study, the researchers compared five-year TAVR outcomes via standard therapy.

The study has included about 358 patients from 21 medical centers. The patients were an average of 83 and with severe aortic stenosis for five years. The researchers divided the participants in two different groups. The first group included patients that underwent minimally invasive transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) surgery, while the second group had patients that followed standard therapy.

The researchers found that the patients who underwent TAVR lived longer with fewer hospital readmissions. After five years, about 28.2% patients of TAVR group were still alive, while the second group’s only 6.4% patients were alive.

In a press release, Samir Kapadia, Director of the Sones Cardiac Catheterization Laboratories at Cleveland Clinic and lead author of the study, said, “This trial is the first--and will probably be the only--randomized aortic stenosis trial that includes a group of patients not treated with aortic valve replacement, since these results will make it unethical to treat severe aortic stenosis patients with medical therapy alone”.