A 60 year-old woman with rheumatic mitral stenosis underwent re-replacement of Cross- Jones caged lens mitral valve prosthesis, 36 years after valve implantation. In 1968, she underwent mitral commissurotomy. In 1992, she had a stroke, and in July 2009 echocardiography revealed the malfunction of the prosthesis with pannus and reduced mitral prosthetic area < 1.0 cm(2) with the elevated transpr...

BACKGROUND Long-term outcome of patients treated with a St. Jude prosthetic heart valve was reported by investigators in Lausanne, Switzerland. This article quantifies the mortality and morbidity implications of single or multiple heart valve replacement. RESULTS After hospital discharge, mortality ratios were highest for duration 5-10 years, roughly comparable in patients who received a sing...

BACKGROUND Transcatheter aortic valve implantation is a highly specialized technique offering a new therapeutic option to patients at high risk for conventional surgery. Complications associated with this catheter procedure differ from complications after surgical aortic valve replacement. This is to report incidence, management, and impact on morbidity and mortality of CoreValve dislocation du...

The Medtronic-Hall cardiac valvular prosthesis has been available for insertion since 1977. This report reviews the English language literature concerning that valve published during the last 14 years. The review is focused on three modes of assessment. First, experience with valve implantation techniques and their results has demonstrated that with careful attention to education of the implant...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the feasibility of minimally invasive transapical beating heart aortic valve implantation (TAP-AVI) for high-risk patients with aortic stenosis. METHODS TAP-AVI was performed via a small anterolateral minithoracotomy in 50 patients from February 2006 to March 2007. A balloon expandable transcatheter xenograft (Edwards SAPIEN THV, Edwards Lifesciences, Irvine, CA, USA) wa...

Transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) is a highly effective procedure in selected patients with severe degenerative aortic valve stenosis at high risk for conventional surgery. Coronary occlusion is a periprocedural life-threatening complication that despite its low frequency (˂1%) is poorly predictable and requires immediate diagnosis and treatment. Herein, we report a coronary obstru...

Mechanical prosthesis is the first choice for valve replacement at the mitral position in children. Replacement of the original prosthesis because of prosthesis-patient mismatch (PPM) is almost inevitable when prostheses are implanted in small children. The impact of PPM on long-term mortality becomes significant when the effective orifice area (EOA) is severely reduced. In these cases prosthes...

OBJECTIVES Interventional treatment of tricuspid valve disease has so far received little attention due to the anatomical challenges in a thrombogenic surrounding. In the present study, we present an imaging-based, personalized interventional approach to the therapy of tricuspid regurgitation. METHODS In our porcine model, we used rapid prototyping to build a matrix reproducing the geometry o...

Interventional cardiologists have spent years working on and dreaming about transcatheter aortic valve implantation. In 20072008 we were privileged in Spain to use 2 of the most commonly-implanted devices at the time: the Cribier-Edwards aortic valve prosthesis and the CoreValve self-expanding prosthesis. These devices had successful initial results in highsurgical-risk patients with severe aor...

Transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) is an alternative therapy to surgical aortic valve replacement (AVR) in inoperable patients with severe aortic stenosis (AS). Currently, new valve systems are being developed, and we experienced TAVI with the Boston Scientific Lotus Valve System (Marlborough, Massachusetts, USA) with two patients for the first cases in Asia-Pacific countries and Tu...