He couldn’t breathe; he was exhausted. He would get out of breath walking from one room to the other and would have to stop three times on the way to the mailbox at the curb and then back to the house. “Life was getting worse,” said John Defazio, aged 78.

But a groundbreaking minimally invasive surgery at Winthrop University Hospital changed Defazio’s life. He said he is feeling “90% better” and getting stronger every day. “April 27, 2012 is my new birthday,” he said gruffly, his voice thick with emotion. “I get a little choked up.”

Winthrop is one of five hospitals in the New York area to offer the Edwards Sapien Transcatheter Heart Valve for the treatment of aortic valve stenosis, the same condition causing Defazio’s suffering. The treatment, transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) is a technology developed and studied in Europe and the U.S., said Dr. Scott L. Schubach, Chairman of the Department of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery at Winthrop, and Associate professor of surgery at the State University of New York at Stonybrook. The FDA (U.S. Food and Drug Administration) approved the procedure in fall 2012 and Winthrop became one of 70 hospitals out of over 1000 U.S. hospitals that do open heart surgery approved to perform this surgery. Schubach noted that they have a coordinated dedicated heart team and that Winthrop’s inclusion in the program is a “statement of the quality of cardiac surgery and overall care” available there. Schubach noted that Cornell and Columbia were among the original 40 “academic centers” participating in the research in the U.S. and, when it was approved by the FDA, 30 other hospitals were added including Winthrop. Only five New York hospitals have TAVR: Winthrop, Cornell, Columbia, Long Island Jewish and Maimonides.