Alcohol septal ablation

Alcohol septal ablation (ASA) is a minimally invasive heart procedure to treat hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM).^[1]

It is a percutaneous, minimally invasive procedure performed by an interventional cardiologist to relieve symptoms and improve functional status in eligible patients with severely symptomatic HCM who meet strict clinical, anatomic and physiologic selection criteria. In carefully selected patients, when performed by an experienced interventional cardiologist, the procedure is successful in relieving symptoms in over 90% of patients.

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is a condition of the cardiac muscle which grows abnormally thick in the absence of a pathophysiologic cause such as hypertension (high blood pressure) or aortic valve disease. In a large subset of patients with hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy, thickening of the heart muscle in a particular part of the interventricular septum causes obstruction to blood being ejected from the left ventricle.

Alcohol septal ablation is a cardiac catheterization technique designed to reduce the obstruction to blood being ejected from the heart. The technique creates a small controlled myocardial infarction, killing the area of heart muscle responsible for the obstruction, and eventually causing it to fibrose and become less thick.