For people living with heart failure, simple tasks can quickly become a daunting challenge. Lifestyle modifications and medications are often used to help control symptoms, but a reliable treatment wasn’t available until now.

New research, published in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented at the Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics meeting, found that patients who had a small clip surgically placed on their mitral valve had a higher quality of life and lower mortality.

“This is a game changer,” Mathew R. Williams, MD, director of the Heart Valve Center at NYU Langone, told The New York Times. “This will change how we treat these patients.”

During the procedure, physicians such as Dr. Williams run a catheter through the patient’s blood vessels to the heart. With imaging guidance, the catheter is advanced to the mitral valve. A device called the MitraClip® is deployed to clip the two flaps of the valve together, offering an important, minimally invasive surgical option for patients with heart failure.

Read more from The New York Times.