Editorial Policy

I want Biomedical Advances to be accurate, useful, and clearly sourced on the subject of heart valve disease and the procedures that treat it. This page explains how that happens, and why a site written by a patient still leans on a cardiologist’s review.

Whose words, and whose check

The experience here is mine, written in the first person by me, Diane Farrow, after my own TAVR for aortic stenosis. Because I am not a clinician, a cardiologist reads every article that carries a clinical claim before it goes live. The two jobs stay apart by design: I hold the lived experience, and the cardiologist safeguards the accuracy. When a piece has been through review, it names the reviewer, lists their credentials, and gives the date the check was done. My current reviewer is Dr. Helena Voss, MD, FESC, a consultant interventional cardiologist.

What I research from

My research rests on the major cardiology guidelines and the primary trial evidence, not on a single leaflet or a single opinion. That means the 2020 ACC/AHA and 2021 ESC/EACTS valve guidelines, the PARTNER and Evolut trial programmes published in the New England Journal of Medicine, and patient-facing explanations from bodies such as the British Heart Foundation and the American Heart Association. Any figure I put in print, thirty-day mortality, stroke risk, the chance of needing a pacemaker, valve durability, comes with its source named.

Plain about outcomes

TAVR is a remarkable advance, but it is a real procedure with real risks, and its valves are not permanent. I state the numbers plainly: the stroke risk of roughly 2 to 3 percent, the pacemaker rate that can reach one in five, the durability that is measured in years rather than decades. Readers deserve the full picture, the awkward parts included, so they can plan around what is true rather than what is comfortable.

Keeping it current

Cardiology moves quickly, and TAVR has moved from inoperable patients to the low-risk end in barely a decade. I return to published articles on a regular cycle and rework them as the guidelines and the long-term data mature. On each one you will find when it was published and, where there has been one, the date of the latest revision or fresh review.

Independence, and corrections

No one pays me to steer readers toward a hospital, a device maker, or a particular valve, and I name no provider or brand as a recommendation. Costs are given as ranges, with a note to confirm the current price, because they vary so widely by country and system. Catch an error and the Contact page will reach me, and I will look into it without delay.