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The first question is, is this Mitral or Aortic valve replacement/repair (it could technically be tricuspid or pulmonary valve, but not many surgeons will crack the chest of a 70 year old woman to fix valves on the less critical right side of the heart). Mitral repair is fairly common, but Aortic is almost always a valve replacement.
At your mom's age, this will be a tissue valve replacement, if she indeed is having the replacement. Tissue valves have a shorter lifespan than mechanical (15 years plus for tissue vs. a lifetime for mechanical), but in patients over 65 tissue it is pretty common to use tissue due to the lack of anticoagulation therapy and that the prosthesis is expected to outlast the patient. The tissue options are usually Homograft (human cadaver donor), Xenograft (pig valve, intact) or Artificial Tissue valve (bovine or porcine tissue used to construct a valve, with or without a supporting structure called a stent). Edwards, Medtronic and St. Jude Medical are the chief players in the artificial heart valve market, so there should be substantial information on all of their websites about artificial valve products.
Mitral valve repair usually uses an annuloplasty ring to remodel/support the shape of the mitral valve to allow it to function better. In some cases, the surgeon will also remove an incompetent section of the anterior leaflet and resection the valve to create a more competent mitral valve. Another twist is that the surgeon may attempt to augment the subvalvular structure (chordae tendonae that keep the leaflets from flailing back into the left atrium during ventricular systole) if it is damaged by reattaching it to the ventricular wall. Same players in the Annuloplasty ring market as artificial heart valves.
To do these surgeries, the patients almost always go on heart-lung bypass. This is the biggest source of concern. Her heart will undoubtedly be dramatically healthier after having a valve replaced or repaired, its the stopping the heart and resusitating the patient part that is scary. But on the whole, this really isnt much more risky than bypass surgery, in fact, in someways, its less invasive, because the surgeons don't have to harvest the extra blood vessels from other parts of your body to create the bypass grafts and bypass surgery usually means that the patient has had a heart attack and suffered at least a small amount of damage to actual heart muscle due to oxygen/nutrient starvation from a blockage. The valve replacement patient can be a much healthier patient than the bypass patient.
To answer another question you posed, valve repair is not much different than replacement in terms of seriousness. Both are open-heart/bypass operations. If she is having aortic valve replacement and the entire aortic root is being replaced, that is a bit more complicated, because the coronary arteries need to be reconnected to the aortic graft, but if they are talking repair, it is most likely mitral valve and there is very little difference between repair and replacement in terms of seriousness in the mitral position.
Either way, you need to prepare yourself for the fact that your mother is going to look rough when she comes out of surgery. My wife went through this with her dad, and she was shocked at how "gray" he looked after surgery. He also went through a certain amount of post-surgical depression due to his inability to do simple things (like lift 5 pounds) for quite a while after the surgery. But he is a very healthy man now, and all the better for the surgery.
Best of luck to you and your mother.
posted by 136.237.60...
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