In May 2022, I received an email from Tristan Yan, Editor of Annals of Cardiothoracic Surgery (ACS), inviting me to be the guest editor of an issue of his journal dedicated to aortic valve sparing operations (AVS) because it had been 30 years since the first peer-reviewed publication on this topic (1). Since I was attending the 2022 Techno Praticum College meeting organized by Homayoun Jalali in July in Sydney, I proposed that we meet in person to discuss the contents of this special issue of the ACS. A few hours after arriving in Sydney I met my friend and former clinical fellow Gebrine El Khoury, an early adopter of AVS. I told him about Tristan’s proposal and asked him to be my co-guest editor. He accepted and with the indispensable assistance of Jama Jahanyar, one of Gebrine’s associates, in less than a month we had enough topics to fill two issues of the ACS. Tristan Yan accepted our request for a second issue to better cover all aspects of AVS.
I hope that seasoned and neophyte students of AVS find the articles of these two issues as the best available information on AVS. As with any non-peer reviewed writings in medicine the reader has to have an “open and receptive mind and a balanced view” of the information provided. Gebrine and I did not question the contents of each article but asked the authors to provide the most up to date evidence available on the topic they covered.
Gebrine and I are indebted to Tristan Yan for conceiving the idea of celebrating 30 years of AVS, Kylie Cunningham for her editorial assistance and every author for participating in this special issue of Annals of Cardiothoracic Surgery.
Tirone E. David
Acknowledgments
Funding: None.
Footnotes
Conflicts of Interest: The author has no conflicts of interest to declare.
References
- 1.David TE, Feindel CM. An aortic valve-sparing operation for patients with aortic incompetence and aneurysm of the ascending aorta. J Thorac Cardiovasc Surg 1992;103:617-21; discussion 622. 10.1016/S0022-5223(19)34942-6 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]