OBJECTIVES This report describes our experience with the use of an anticoagulant regimen of adjusted doses of subcutaneous heparin during pregnancy in women with cardiac valve prostheses. BACKGROUND Gravid patients with prosthetic heart valves require long-term anticoagulant therapy. To avoid the increased incidence of fetal morbidity and mortality associated with the use of coumarin agents i...

CONTEXT Stentless aortic valve prostheses have excellent hemodynamic profiles, but may be associated with an increased postoperative heart block when compared to conventional prostheses. AIMS To assess the effect of an alternative subcoronary implantation technique on postoperative complete heart block (CHB) and permanent pacemaker implantation (PPI) following aortic valve replacement (AVR) w...

Although artificial prostheses for diseased heart valves have been around for several decades, viable heart valve replacements have yet to be developed due to their complicated nature. The majority of research in heart valve replacement technology seeks to improve decellularization techniques for porcine valves or bovine pericardium as an effort to improve current clinically used valves. The dr...

BACKGROUND Patients with mechanical heart valve prostheses may experience valve thrombosis and subsequent systemic embolism for which they are treated with oral anticoagulant therapy. It is essential to know reliable estimates of the risks and benefits of this therapy in order to answer a number of clinical questions rationally. We sought to obtain more precise estimates of the risks and benefi...

Bowes, V. F., Datta, B. N., Silver, M. D. and Minielly, J. A. (1974). Thorax, 29, 530-533. Annular injuries following the insertion of heart valve prostheses. The clinical presentation and morphological findings in eight cases of annular injury associated with the insertion of prosthetic heart valves are discussed. The lesions presented as a separation of the left atrium and ventricle at the mi...

INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES Preservation of the aortic valve using the technique described by David has been shown to be as effective as the Bentall-De Bono procedure. It avoids both the need for long-term anticoagulation and the complications associated with mechanical prostheses. We report our initial experience using this technique in patients with Marfan syndrome. METHODS Between April 20...

A new type of mechanical aortic valve prosthesisTornado-compatible valve (TCV) is worked out basing on the principle of hydrodynamic compatibility with the swirling Tornado-like blood flow present in the heart cavities and main arteries. The design and profile of the TCV were calculated basing on the exact solution of the non stationary hydrodynamic equations for the class of self organizing To...

DURING recent years, considerable effort has been directed to the development of effective operative methods for the correction of stenotic and regurgitant malformations of the aortic valve. Initially, reconstructive procedures on the valve were performed, but the results of these operations were generally unsatisfactory. Prosthetic valves were then utilized, and the first ones to gain wide acc...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the outcome of pregnancy in women with mechanical heart valve prostheses in relation to the anticoagulant treatment used in the first trimester and the incidence of thrombotic and bleeding complications. METHODS 92 pregnancies in 59 women were followed between 1986 and 1997. In 31 pregnancies, oral anticoagulants were discontinued when pregnancy was diagnosed and subcuta...

I read with interest the article by Sung and colleagues about tricuspid valve replacement [1]. I agree with the authors that their reported results, although better than others, are still unsatisfactory. I think tricuspid valve replacement is an unfavourable surgery rather than catastrophic. The most important question in these operations is when to replace and not to repair the tricuspid valve...