An appreciation of the natural history of acquired valvular heart disease is a prerequisite to an understanding of how surgical intervention has altered the natural outlook. The prognosis for a patient with valvular heart disease treated medically is dependent on the stage of the disease at which he is first seen. Therefore, assessment for surgery requires evaluation of the pathophysiologic con...

Era Before 1950 In 1950, rheumatic valvular heart disease (VHD) was the most common cause of VHD. The link between streptococcal infection and rheumatic fever was established, and a successful trial of penicillin prophylaxis against rheumatic fever was reported.1 In 1944, Jones published a seminal article on diagnosis of rheumatic fever.2 The American Heart Association (AHA) and Circulation pla...

A better knowledge of the natural history of valvular disease and the advances in surgical techniques are allowing to improve the prognosis of patients with valvular heart disease. At present, imaging techniques, particularly Doppler-echocardiography, is the main tool to determine the diagnosis and prognosis of patients with valvular heart disease. Consequently, decision making in valvular hear...

There are very few studies on valvular heart disease in women. There is a sex influence in the prevalence of some types of valve disease: it is well known that rheumatic mitral stenosis is very common in women but degenerative valve disease affects both sexes in a similar way. In degenerative aortic stenosis several physiopathological differences have been reported in women: the amount of calci...

Broadly speaking, pathology is categorized as being primarily related to valvular stenosis (AS) or regurgitation (AR), but a diseased valve may often exhibit both. The predilection of degenerative disease of the aortic valve, particularly stenosis, for the elderly has resulted in a steadily increasing prevalence as the population ages. As general life expectancy increases in the United States a...

308 As technology advances resulted in more effective percutaneous approaches to the treatment of valvular stenosis, the terminology used to describe these procedures evolved as well. The term “commissurotomy” originated from the surgical procedure developed for commissural mitral valve stenosis (see chapter 34), and some thought valvuloplasty should be reserved for surgical procedures that mor...

Sir,?May I request you to kindly find a place for the following suggestion in your valuable journal, along with your own criticism on it Fibrolysin in Valvular Disease of Heart. Most of your readers are, I believe, aware of the varied uses to which Fibrolysin has been put, after it was placed 011 the market. So far as I am aware, nobody has, as yet, tried it in valvular disease of heart. Yet, s...

Valvular involvement by disease causes stenosis, insufficiency (regurgitation or incompetence), or both. Stenosis is the failure of a valve to open completely, thereby impeding forward flow. Insufficiency, in contrast, results from failure of a valve to close completely, thereby allowing reversed flow. These abnormalities can be either pure, when only stenosis or regurgitation is present, or mi...

Right atrial dilation due to left heart disease is a common complication among adults. The present review aimed to describe a case of massively dilated right atrium in a female patient presenting with valvular heart disease and no atrial fibrillation. The results of chest X-ray revealed a large opacity filling the lower right hemithorax, falsely interpreted as a mediastinal mass. During the tra...

in recent socio-economic state it is not possible to have different sets of prosthetic cardiac valves available in the operating room before open-heart surgery for valvular replacement. in this study the diameter of the aortic valve ring measured in 2-d echocardiography was compared with the size of the aortic prosthetic valves implanted for the patients with aortic valvular disease. the purpos...