Introduction
The increasing burden of valvular heart disease (VHD)—in particular in an ageing population—is recognized by medical experts, although there is less awareness of these conditions by the general public and relevant stakeholders. Together with emerging non-surgical interventional treatment options, this has led to intense research interest in VHD with an enormous number of publications during the last year. Many of these publications address interventional treatment, including technical refinements and outcomes compared with surgery or medical therapy. In addition, attention has focused on pathophysiological aspects, improved diagnosis, risk stratification, and optimal timing for intervention. Importantly, new guidelines for the management of VHD have been published by both the ESC/EACTS and ACC/AHA.1,2 This short overview can neither address all changes in the guidelines nor acknowledge all appreciable research efforts over this year. Thus, we have selected a few papers as examples that reflect the breadth of ongoing research, with the expectation that interested readers will find additional articles using online searches.