BACKGROUND Patients undergoing heart-valve replacement may receive a mechanical prosthesis, necessitating lifelong anticoagulant treatment, or a porcine bioprosthesis, which involves no absolute need for anticoagulants. METHODS We carried out a randomized, prospective trial to compare the durability of the Bjork-Shiley mechanical prosthesis (spherical tilting-disk model) and the incidence of ...

Open heart surgery has been performed at the Massachusetts General Hospital in 13 patients less than 6 months after the initiation of treatment for acute or subacute bacterial endocarditis. The endocarditis involved the aortic valve in 12 cases and a mitral valve prosthesis in the other. In two patients there was concomitant rupture of chordae tendineae of the mitral valve. One patient received...

BACKGROUND The indications for continuous oral anticoagulant treatment, the target interval and the procedures for withdrawing treatment have changed in the last 10 years. METHODS Patients on continuous oral anticoagulant treatment at the Outpatient Anticoagulant Clinic at Umeå University Hospital in 2002 were included in a descriptive study (n = 900). 263 of those had a mechanical heart valv...

Device description Name and manufacture: HighLife SAS, Paris, France. Approval status: Preclinical. Platform: Nitinol. Specific design: The HighLife transcatheter mitral valve replacement device is a two-component system (Figure 1). The valve prosthesis is implanted over a delivery system in the mitral position and is anchored by interacting and then reaching an equilibrium position with a prev...

Classical aortic valve replacement is often fraught with negative outcomes for patients. When replacing the a mechanical prosthesis, patient associated life use of indirect anticoagulants, which leads to hemorrhagic and thrombotic complications. In case biological fairly frequent complication early calcification and, consequently, high frequency dysfunctions prosthesis. addition, prosthetics he...

The case is reported of a 48-year-old man suffering from Brucella endocarditis on a double prosthesis. The successful medical and surgical treatment is described. So far as the authors know, this is the first report of Brucella endocarditis from a heart valve prosthesis.

Since 1955, with the progress of safer methods of extra corporeal circularion, open heart surgery started to go through great advancements. As far as the treatment of vaive disease is concerned those improvements made it possible to think about repla cing the diseased heart valves with prostheses. Even before the era of open heart surgery, correction of aortic insufficiency had been clinically ...

Valve prostheses have played an important part in the past two decades in the management of patients with valvular heart disease. However, many of the devices used in valve replacement have introduced new clinical problems. This paper deals with some of the problems associated with valve replacement, including one not previously emphasized valve prosthesis-patient mismatch, which may cause obst...

Approximately 275 000 patients receive a heart valve replacement annually. Their choices and the choices of their surgeons are limited to either a metal valve replacement or a preserved (typically allogeneic or xenogeneic) tissue valve replacement. These patients are then subject to the morbidity associated with anticoagulation when mechanical valves are used or the limited durability of a biol...

Methods All patients younger than 70 years of age undergoing isolated aortic valve replacement from October 2005 to October 2011 were analyzed. Patient-prosthesis mismatch was defined as the indexed effective orifice area ≤ 0,85cm2/m2. We studied the impact of patient-prosthesis mismatch on mid-term overall mortality, cardiac events and New York Heart Association functional class using an analy...