New Orleans ? Eighty-year-olds with clogged arteries or leaky heart valves used to be sent home with a pat on the arm from their doctors and pills to try to ease their symptoms.

Now more are getting open-heart surgery, with remarkable survival rates rivaling those of much younger people, new studies show.

Years ago, physicians “were told we were pushing the envelope” to operate on a 70-year-old, said Dr. Vincent Bufalino, a cardiologist at Loyola University in Chicago.

But today “we have elderly folks who are extremely viable, mentally quite sharp,” who want to decide for themselves whether to take the risk, he said.

Even 90-year-olds are having open-heart surgery, said Dr. Harlan Krumholz, a Yale University cardiologist who has researched older heart patients.

“Age itself shouldn’t be an automatic exclusion,” he said. Not every older person can undergo such a challenging operation, but the great results seen in the new studies show that doctors have gotten good at figuring out who can.

The studies were reported at an American Heart Association conference this week in New Orleans.

People 75 and older are the fastest-growing segment of the population; this group is projected to more than quadruple over the next 50 years. Forty percent have heart disease, and half will die from it.

In recent years, surgical techniques, anesthesia and other medical care advanced, and death rates fell. That led more doctors to operate on older patients for everything from bum knees to cancer to bad backs.