Dr. Helena Voss, MD, FESC

Dr. Helena Voss is a consultant interventional cardiologist whose clinical work centres on structural heart disease: the catheter-based valve procedures, TAVR and transcatheter mitral repair among them, that have moved so much of heart-valve treatment away from open surgery over the past two decades. She has sat on the multidisciplinary heart teams that decide, patient by patient, whether someone is better served by a keyhole procedure or by an operation, which is exactly the judgement this site tries to explain from the outside.

She fact-checks the medical side of what Diane writes here. Her job is to make sure the explanations of how these procedures work, the numbers attached to their risks and durability, and the way candidacy is decided all reflect current cardiology practice and the major guidelines, and to flag anything that overstates a benefit or understates a risk. Reviewing an article is not the same as giving medical advice: whether a particular valve procedure is right for you is a decision for your own heart team, who can examine you, read your scans, and weigh your specific risks. Nothing here replaces that conversation.