Cardiac auscultation remains a critical component of the pediatric examination and is the primary method of diagnosis for the common innocent murmurs of childhood. This article outlines the significance of auscultation and defines the skills important for the diagnosis and recognition of common cardiac murmurs in childhood. The origin of heart sounds and murmurs is reviewed, and an approach to ...

The Heart sounds and murmurs provide crucial diagnosis information for several heart diseases such as natural or prosthetic valve dysfunction and heart failure. Many pathological conditions of the cardiovascular system cause murmurs and aberrations in heart sounds. Phonocardiography provides the clinician with a complementary tool to record the heart sounds heard during auscultation. The advanc...

STUDY OBJECTIVE The accurate and inexpensive noninvasive assessment of the presence and severity of aortic stenosis remains a challenge. In this study, we performed spectral analysis on the murmurs of a group of patients with this disease in order to assess its severity. DESIGN An electronic stethoscope was used to generate a spectral analysis of murmurs in patients with aortic stenosis. The ...

The occurrence of relatively soft continuous murmurs of the venous hum type in supradiaphragmatic forms of total anomalous pulmonary venous drainage is well recognized (Keith et al., 1954; Keith, Rowe, and Vlad, 1958). Loud continuous murmurs occur at times but are considerably less common (McKusick, 1958). This paper describes two cases of total anomalous pulmonary venous drainage in which lou...

Degenerative mitral valve disease is responsible for the syndromes of billowing mitral leaflet, mitral valve prolapse (MVP), floppy mitral valve, and flail leaflet. The pathology of these is mainly caused by myxomatous infiltration and fibroelastic deficiency. In the 1960s, Reid and Barlow and colleagues proposed that mid to late systolic clicks and apical late systolic murmurs were of mitral v...

Innocent heart murmurs are quite common in children and adolescents. These murmurs are physiologic in nature and are not associated with any structural heart disease. Not only does the idea of having a child with a murmur bring unnecessary unrest to families, but the child also often goes through numerous tests that could be avoided. It is critical to obtain a detailed history and perform a tho...

BACKGROUND Differentiating innocent cardiac murmurs from murmurs caused by congenital cardiac anomalies can be challenging with auscultation alone in asymptomatic puppies. HYPOTHESIS Plasma N-terminal pro-B-type natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP) concentrations and phonocardiograms recorded by an electronic stethoscope can differentiate innocent from pathologic cardiac murmurs. ANIMALS A total...

Cardiac murmur is frequently recognized in healthy children, but it can also be the presenting feature in many forms of congenital heart disease, including regurgitation or stenosis of heart valves or left-to-right shunt lesions at the atrial, ventricular, or great arterial levels. Careful examination reveals innocent systolic murmurs in as many as 72% of all school-age children [1]. A high pre...