Current management and surgical advances in patients with hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is a genetic disease and the most frequent primary cardiomyopathy, affecting 1:500 of the general population. Integrated multimodality imaging, including transthoracic echocardiography, 2- and 3‑dimensional transesophageal echocardiography, stress echocardiography, and cardiac magnetic resonance, has provided answers to questions on the management of HCM, leading to standardized protocols. The late 1990s brought the news of a nonsurgical treatment of obstruction in HCM. It is now increasingly evident that septal ablation cannot address all the mechanisms of the left ventricular outflow tract (LVOT) gradient, especially mitral valve involvement. According to American and European guidelines, surgical septal myectomy is the current gold standard treatment. However, deep septal myectomy requires specific operator and institutional experience; therefore, it should not be performed in small community hospitals but only in centers of excellence for HCM treatment. The so-called Ferrazzi technique involves cutting the fibrotic secondary chordae of the mitral valve (MV) and thus helps avoid a deep myectomy by moving the anterior mitral leaflet and the coaptation point of the MV posteriorly away from the septum. This technique, together with careful mobilization of the papillary muscles, helped us achieve excellent results since November 2015, with no mortality, resolution of the LVOT gradient, and MV preservation in all 72 patients. Owing to recent advances in the surgical treatment of hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy, addressing not only the septum but also the MV, the procedure of a deep myectomy has been simplified and mitral regurgitation adequately corrected.