NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Age shouldn't be a disqualifying factor for patients who need surgery to replace a major valve in the heart, according to new data.

Dr. Farzan Filsoufi and colleagues from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City found that people 80 years of age or older who underwent aortic valve replacement fared nearly as well as younger patients.

Filsoufi said in an interview with Reuters Health that their findings show the procedure shouldn't be delayed in older people who are good candidates for surgery. "There's a tendency...to delay valvular surgery in elderly patients because they are considered high risk."

Blockage of the aortic valve can occur with aging and is expected to become more common as the US population ages, Filsoufi's group notes in their report, published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. To obtain updated information on the outcome of valve replacement surgery according to age, the researchers reviewed the records of 1,308 consecutive patients who underwent the procedure at Mount Sinai between 1998 and 2006. Of these patients, 17.6 percent were 80 or older.

The older patients were no more likely to die in the hospital than the younger patients, the researchers found.

However, they did have a greater risk of respiratory failure, and spent an average of 10 days in the hospital after the procedure, compared with seven days for the younger patients.

About two thirds of the oldest patients lived for at least five years after the operation, a rate of survival comparable to people of the same age in the general population.