Heart Valve Disease: Harnessing Innovation to Save Lives, Mitigate Costs, and Advance the Healthy Aging Agenda

Senior people are crucial contributors to society and the economy.

Untreated heart valve disease (HVD) is a barrier to active aging but conversely, early detection and timely treatment will increase longevity and quality of life.

For heart valve disease, symptoms like shortness of breath, fatigue, dizziness, and chest pain are too often dismissed as “just a normal part of getting old.” This ageist assumption impedes detection, slows the path to diagnosis, and limits a person’s ability to access interventions. These delays can have tragic consequences. When untreated, severe, symptomatic aortic stenosis, the most common type of heart valve disease, has a mortality rate between 25 and 50 percent per year.

Global Heart Hub’s Heart Valve Disease Patient Council has collaborated with Global Coalition on Aging, the world’s leading business voice on aging-related policy and strategy, to develop a position paper on Heart Valve Disease and the Healthy Aging Agenda, aiming to build a firm base for a policy imperative across the world to tackle HVD given that it is a barrier in active and healthy ageing with huge economic consequences.

Read the Position Paper

Position Paper in Spanish LATAM

People with heart valve disease are falling through the gaps in our health systems.

Low public awareness, uneven rates of screening and diagnosis, and lack of access to treatments lead to avoidable deaths, impacts, and costs. To overcome the biases of ageism and ensure care early in disease progression it’s necessary to promote policy action, health system mobilization, and public awareness of risks, as well as inform older adults about the availability of effective, evidence-based interventions and support patients for shared decision-making about the full range of evidence-based options.

In December 2022, the Global Heart Hub in collaboration with the Global Coalition on Aging, organized a roundtable of international and cross-sector experts to understand the global burden of HVD in the ageing population; identify the barriers and gaps in the patient journey and find focus areas to drive progress against HVD.

In light of this opportunity, and aligned with the UN Decade of Healthy Ageing, the experts at the roundtable called on policymakers; health system leaders; patients, caregivers, and their advocates; healthcare providers; and other stakeholders to prioritize and strengthen responses to heart valve disease.

Together, a multi-sector coalition of leaders and organizations can combat ageist stereotypes that constrain care, improve early detection and diagnosis, and ensure increased and widespread access to life-saving interventions.

Read the Press Release

Solving for heart valve disease is solving for healthy and active aging.

Early screening of heart valve disease saves public health care systems resources, but prevalent ageism delays diagnosis, limits care, and leads to avoidable costs and impacts on people’s lives.

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Our Call to Action

Early detection and rapid access to high-quality diagnosis and care, offered by a multidisciplinary team is key to improve outcomes and quality of life of the patients. Taking the patient perspective on what is needed to achieve optimal care is essential.

Medical advances, health innovations and public awareness have promoted earlier detection and significantly improved diagnosis as well as treatment options, offering effective interventions to address heart valve disease – but we must drive implementation at scale. Greater urgency is needed to ensure that patients and families, health systems, and societies reap the full benefits of these innovations. This will happen only if:

There is greater awareness globally and across stakeholder disciplines.
Health systems respond with equitable access, reimbursement, and encouragement for the use of innovations.
Heart valve disease is recognized globally as a central element of the Decade of Healthy Aging.

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