INTRODUCTION Patients with mechanical heart valve prostheses must continuously be treated with oral anticoagulants to prevent thromboembolic events related to prosthetesis. These patients should be continually evaluated for the control of oral anticoagulation. OBJECTIVE To compare the occurrence of thromboembolic and hemorragic complications in patients with mechanical heart valve prosthesis ...

BACKGROUND Functional mitral regurgitation (MR) is caused by systolic traction on the mitral leaflets related to ventricular distortion. Little is known about whether chronic tethering causes the mitral leaflet area to adapt to the geometric needs imposed by tethering, in part because of inability to reconstruct leaflet area in vivo. Our aim was to explore whether adaptive increases in leaflet ...

PURPOSE The goal of this study is to model changes in fibre content in aortic valve leaflet material due to mechanical stimuli. METHODS The fibre remodelling process is associated with the redistribution of the internal forces acting in the shell. The process is characterized by the occurrence of extreme stresses and strains. The load distribution function is asymmetrical. The optimization pr...

BACKGROUND The patient package insert, an information leaflet included by law in the packaging of prescription drugs, contains information for the user on the specific medication. OBJECTIVES To explore how patient information leaflets influence patient anxiety and adherence. METHODS A prospective cohort study was conducted in the practices of 15 family physicians. All patients receiving a n...

BACKGROUND Leaflet curvature is known to reduce mechanical stress. There are 2 major components that contribute to this curvature. Leaflet billowing introduces the most obvious form of leaflet curvature. The saddle shape of the mitral annulus imparts a more subtle form of leaflet curvature. This study explores the relative contributions of leaflet billowing and annular shape on leaflet curvatur...

Introduction: Patient health education through information leaflets plays a very important role in the understanding about diseases, drugs and lifestyle modifications in diabetes mellitus. Aim: To develop and assess the quality and readability of patient information leaflet for diabetes mellitus. Methods: patient information leaflet for diabetes mellitus was developed by referring to various on...

BACKGROUND In hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a spectrum of mitral leaflet abnormalities has been related to the mechanism of mitral systolic anterior motion (SAM), which causes both subaortic obstruction and mitral regurgitation. In the individual patient, SAM and regurgitation vary in parallel; clinically, however, great interindividual differences in mitral regurgitation can occur for comparabl...

Aortic valve leaflets undergo extraordinary flexion due to the complete reversal of their curvature during billions of cardiac cycles. The flexion stresses in the leaflet depend on its elastic modulus which we investigated in vivo and in vitro. In six dogs, we placed radiopaque markers on an aortic leaflet. Leaflet length was calculated from the marker positions recorded fluoroscopically. Aorti...

OBJECTIVES This study aimed to evaluate the benefits of an interactive and visual flowchart-type leaflet for head and neck cancer inpatients who received induction chemotherapy, docetaxel, cisplatin, and 5-fluorourasil (DCF), or docetaxel, cisplatin, and S-1 (DCS) from September 2009 to April 2012. The flowchart-type leaflet group used a flowchart-type leaflet during chemotherapy, while the non...

BACKGROUND We introduce a technique of posterior annulus shortening to augment leaflet coaptation which addresses the restrictive mitral leaflet mobility in ischemic mitral incompetence (IMI), and report its long-term outcome. METHODS Between 1992 and 2012, 75 patients (mean age, 64.6±10.4 years; median, 66.0 years; range, 35.0-86.1 years) underwent repair of IMI by posterior annulus shorteni...