A 50-year old woman presented with arterial thrombosis in the right leg. Echocardiography revealed a mobile left atrial thrombus and severe mitral stenosis. She underwent a left atrial thrombectomy, the maze procedure and mitral valve plasty. Anterior and posterior mitral leaflets arose directly from the anterior papillary muscle, and from the posterior papillary muscle intervened by short chor...

We present a case of an individual who presented with acute severe mitral regurgitation in the setting of an inferior ST elevation myocardial infarction. Both transthoracic and transesophageal echocardiography demonstrated a posteriorly directed eccentric jet of severe mitral regurgitation with flail anterior mitral valve leaflet attached presumably to the anterior papillary muscle. Intraoperat...

The anatomy of the papillary muscle of the conus, also known as Lancisi's muscle, was studied in 100 normal hearts from pathological collections and in 8 embryonic and fetal hearts. Wide morphological variations were observed and because of this the name medial papillary complex is proposed. It is concluded that the value of this complex as an anatomical landmark in the right ventricle is a ver...

INTRODUCTION Multisystem organ failure remains a poorly understood complication of sepsis. During sepsis, reduced excitability contributes to organ failure of skeletal muscle, nerves and the spinal cord. The goal of this study was to determine whether reduced excitability might also contribute to cardiac failure during sepsis. METHODS Wistar rats were made septic by cecal ligation and punctur...

Ischemic rupture of the anterolateral papillary muscle is uncommon due to its dual blood supply. It usually follows an ischemic event involving branches of the left circumflex or left anterior descending arteries. We present a case of a patient admitted with an acute inferior wall myocardial infarction and an isolated distal right coronary artery occlusion. Acute mitral regurgitation with ruptu...

Background Papillary muscle scarring may result in mitral regurgitation and may be foci for ventricular arrhythmias. However, papillary muscle scarring may be difficult to detect with delayed enhancement MRI (DE-MRI) since there is often poor contrast between hyperenhanced tissue and immediately adjacent bright blood pool. We have developed a new, Flow-Independent Dark-blood DeLayed Enhancement...

BACKGROUND Better understanding of the precise 3-dimensional geometric changes of the mitral valvular-ventricular complex in chronic ischemic mitral regurgitation (CIMR) is needed in order to devise better surgical repair techniques. We hypothesized that changes after inferior myocardial infarction would be different in hearts that developed CIMR compared with those that did not. METHODS AND ...

Papillary muscle rupture usually occurs as a catastrophic complication of acute myocardial infarction in patients with coronary artery stenosis; it is therefore less common in patients without coronary artery stenosis. We report the case of a 67-year old woman without coronary artery stenosis who suffered an acute anterolateral papillary muscle rupture and was successfully treated with mitral v...

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is the term for a heterogeneous group of disorders for which various mutations of genes involving proteins of the cardiac sarcomere lead to hypertrophy of various segments of the left ventricle. The hypertrophy can involve the left and/or right ventricle, be symmetric or asymmetric, involving the septum, free wall, mid-ventricle, or apex. The phenomenon of solitary p...

TO DETERMINE whether, in certain aspects, hypertrophied heart muscle behaves differently from normal heart muscle simple observations were performed. Papillary muscle strips from the left ventricle of rats, the hearts of which had been caused to hypertrophy, were compared with papillary strips from normal rat hearts by measuring tension developed at various weights in a perfused isolated muscle...