Heart team approach for comprehensive management of aortic coarctation in the adult

Aortic coarctation in the adult is usually associated with chronic systemic hypertension, which leads to the sequelae of congestive heart failure, vascular dysfunction and decreased lifespan. Open and endovascular treatment modalities both provide excellent procedural outcomes with minimal mortality and morbidity, but a structured algorithm for workup and periprocedural decision making is not well established. We outline our heart team decision making approach along with our institution's experience treating this condition.

We retrospectively reviewed twenty-four consecutive adult patients treated for aortic coarctation since 2010 at a single center. Outcomes of interest included mortality, treatment approach, device used and post-procedure hypertension status. We describe our protocol for work-up and intervention decision making. We explain our rationale for recommending treatment and the approach, open or endovascular, using existing literature and our experience.

Procedural success rate was 100%, and there were no 30-day, one-year or five-year mortalities, whether the approach was open or endovascular. At last contact, 32% of patients were normotensive and no longer taking blood pressure medications. Several patients presented with complex problems as a result of commonly described complications of prior open or endovascular repair, and we describe our approach to the management of these difficult cases.

Even at a high-volume heart and vascular hospital, aortic coarctation is an uncommon presentation in adult patients. Our experience suggests that excellent outcomes are obtained by discussing each patient among a multidisciplinary heart team and developing a work-up and treatment protocol to guide selection of interventional modality.