OBJECTIVES To identify risk factors associated with cardiac valve calcification that is easily detectable through routine blood tests in patients who received valve replacement therapy. METHODS Four hundred patients with valvular heart disease who underwent valve replacement surgery between December 2009 and January 2013 were enrolled in this study. Of these, 77 had valve calcification; the o...

Cardiac injury after blunt trauma is common but underreported. Common cardiac trauma after the blunt chest injury (BCI) is cardiac contusion; it is very rare to have cardiac valve injury. The mitral valve injury during chest trauma occurs when extreme pressure is applied at early systole during the isovolumic contraction between the closure of the mitral valve and the opening of the aortic valv...

Cardiac injury from cardiopulmonary resuscitation is a rare phenomenon. A 72-year-old women following elective mitral valve repair suffered cardiac arrest (pulseless electrical activity). Post-resuscitation transoesophageal echocardiogram (Fig. 1) revealed a rupture of the anterior papillary muscle of the tricuspid valve (Fig. 2). She underwent emergency tricuspid valve replacement with a succe...

we present a very rare case of partially unroofed coronary sinus without persistent left superior vena cava in a 74 years old female with a history of hypertension, severe myxomatous bileaflet mitral valve prolapse with severe eccentric mitral regurgitation which was diagnosed during cardiac surgery.

A 38-year-old male patient presented to our hospital with a 3-month history of shortness of breath in combination with severe peripheral edema and ascites. Twenty-two years previously, he had undergone bioprosthetic tricuspid valve implantation due to Ebstein anomaly. Transthoracic echocardiography revealed significantly dilated right cardiac chambers, reduced right ventricular function, stenot...

Aortic valve rupture, secondary to aortic valve endocarditis, was diagnosed echocardiographically and closely followed preoperatively. The ruptured left coronary cusp of the aortic valve was seen as dense irregular echoes, located anteriorly during ventricular diastole, and protruding into the left ventricular outflow tract in an otherwise normally appearing aortic valve. These echocardiographi...

High precision is necessary during percutaneous transcatheter heart valve implantation. The precision of the implantation has been established by increasing the heart rate (usually to 200 beats per minute) to the point of significantly reduced cardiac output and thus minimizing valve movement. Routinely, this tachycardia is induced by rapid pacing. Here we report a case of failure to pace durin...

To the Editor: I read with interest the excellent report on sudden cardiac death with apparently normal heart by Chugh et al.1 Of note was the finding that 28 of 270 hearts (10%) had pathological criteria for mitral valve prolapse. In addressing the association between mitral valve prolapse and sudden cardiac death, the authors classified these hearts as having a nonspecific structural abnormal...

BACKGROUND Congenital heart disease is the most common type of birth defect, affecting ≈2% of the population. Malformations involving the cardiac outflow tract and semilunar valves account for >50% of these cases predominantly because of a bicuspid aortic valve, which has an estimated prevalence of 1% in the population. We previously reported that mutations in NOTCH1 were a cause of bicuspid ao...