Fix the valve earlier, halve the heart-failure stays: a 744-patient trial rewrites the waiting game

For people whose aortic valve — the heart's main exit door — is moderately narrowed, the standard advice has been to watch and wait until the narrowing turns severe. The PROGRESS trial, published in The New England Journal of Medicine and presented at the TCT 2026 conference in San Diego, tested acting sooner: 744 patients aged 65 and over, at 74 centres in six countries, were assigned either to an earlier catheter-based valve replacement (TAVR) or to careful monitoring. After two years, 16.7% of the early-treatment group had died or had a heart-failure event, compared with 23.9% under monitoring — and hospital stays for heart failure were halved, 7.4% against 14.9%. The trial's leaders, including national principal investigator Raj Makkar of Cedars-Sinai, stress this is for selected patients with extra risk features, not everyone — and a ten-year follow-up will show whether the early gain lasts.

SDG 3 · Good health and well-being — Mechanism: tech innovation