Maurice Sarano, MD (Mayo Clinic) and colleagues published the following study in Lancet.1 In this study they pooled a group of population-based studies to obtain data from 11,911 randomly selected adults along with a community study of 16,501 adults, all of whom had been assessed by clinically indicated echocardiography.
The authors showed that 6.4% of the population between ages 65-74 and 9.3% of the population over age 75 suffer from mitral regurgitation.
Further, the authors showed that after age 64, while the prevalence of aortic valve disease continues to grow, mitral valve disease grows at a far more rapid rate.
The US Census Bureau projects this segment of our population will double by 2030 leading a physician at the American College of Cardiology, to refer to mitral valve disease as “our new epidemic”.
1. Burden of Valvular Disease, Sarano, M. MD, Lancet 2006, 368: 1005-1011