BACKGROUND Use of high-dose inhalational anesthesia during open fetal surgery may induce maternal-fetal hemodynamic instability and fetal myocardial depression. The authors' preliminary human retrospective study demonstrated less fetal bradycardia and left ventricular systolic dysfunction with lower dose desflurane supplemented with propofol and remifentanil IV anesthesia (SIVA). In this animal...

Placental dysfunction resulting in intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR) is a common complication of pregnany and severe IUGR, with ensuing fetal hypoxia is an important cause of perinatal mortality and morbidity. Doppler studies of fetal and maternal vessels are routinely used for fetal surveillance and alterations in fetal venous blood flow has been demonstrated as a late sign of fetal compr...

Background: Cardiac dysfunction due to chronic anemia and hemosiderosis are the major causes of death among patients with thalassemia intermedia. This study was performed to compare the cardiac function in thalassemia intermedia patients with normal subjects by means of echocardiography. Materials and Methods: This was a case-control study performed on 22 patients affected by thalassemia int...

Little is known about the vascular and metabolic adaptations that take place in the fetal heart to maintain cardiac function in response to increased load. Chronic fetal anemia has previously been shown to result in increased ventricular mass, increased myocardial vascularization, and increased myocardial expression of hypoxia-inducible factor-1 (HIF-1) and vascular endothelial growth factor (V...

abstract objective cardiac dysfunction is a major cause of death in patients with beta thalassemia. in these patients, repeated blood transfusion, ineffective erythropoiesis and increased gastrointestinal iron absorption lead to iron overload in the body and this induced heart failure. left ventricular ejection fraction was measured in major beta thalassemia (β-th) patients to detect the relati...

Embryonic myocardium has a high rate of cell proliferation and regulates cellular proliferation, contractile function, and myocardial architecture in response to changes in external mechanical loads. However, the small and complex three-dimensional (3D) structure of the embryonic myocardium limits our ability to directly investigate detailed relationships between mechanical load, contractile fu...

BACKGROUND Tissue Doppler imaging (TDI) can be used to assess fetal cardiac function and it has been shown to detect changes associated with hypoxia in animal models. However, the analysis is cumbersome and time consuming. The main objective of this study was to evaluate the feasibility of a new algorithm developed for the automated analysis of color TDI velocity recordings of the fetal myocard...

right ventricular failure due to right coronary artery disease, right ventricular hypertrophy, stunning, abnormal septal motion, myocardial infarction, or non-homogeneous distribution of cardioplegia is an uncommon but serious complication of open heart surgery. we report a patient with severe right ventricular hypertrophy secondary to severe mitral valve stenosis and another patient with detac...