Editorial Heart valve surgery in the United Kingdom: present practice and future trends The surgery of heart valve disease raises many questions. Should we conserve or replace the diseased valve? What should the replacement valve be-a homograft, a biopros-thetic valve, or a mechanical valve? Isn't valve disease becoming less common anyway? Test reports, clinical comparisons, and longitudinal fo...

A 73-year-old female patient was admitted to our hospital with tricuspid valve (TV) regurgitation grade IV. Past medical history revealed previous mechanical mitral valve replacement and implantation of a pacemaker. Clinically she had typical signs of chronic congestive right heart failure. Massive edema of the lower legs were detected during clinical examination. Preoperative echo confirmed se...

BACKGROUND We performed the first quadruple valve replacement with mechanical valves, combined with the correction of complex congenital heart disease on November 17, 1999. We report here the 11-year follow-up study. METHODS A 47-year-old man with subacute rheumatic endocarditis, a ventricular septal defect, and an obstruction of the right ventricular outflow tract required replacement of the...

Valvular heart disease is a pathologic process involving one or more of the four valves (aortic, pulmonary, mitral and tricuspid) of the heart typified by stenosis or regurgitation and leading to patient symptoms. The most common causes are tissue degeneration, rheumatic fever and congenital heart diseases. Aortic valve replacement (AVR) using either mechanical or bioprosthetic (tissue) valves ...

The results of experimental researches hydrodynamic noise generated by a jet flow through the mechanical bileaflet mitral valve prosthesis Italian company Sorin are given. Physical simulation was carried out in laboratory conditions on model left atrial chamber and ventricular heart. artificial increased with increasing water flow. It found that greatest intensity its spectral components observ...

In patients with prosthetic heart valves non-cardiac surgery may require temporary discontinuation of oral anticoagulation. Although the risk of valve related thromboembolic complications may generally be only slightly increased during the short perioperative period, in the presence of certain risk factors, replacement of oral anticoagulation with heparin is recommended. In the presented patien...

conclusions moderate ppm has no negative effect on echocardiographic trans-aortic pressure gradients or the patients’ nyha functional status after avr with a carbomedics prosthesis in the mid-term follow up. results of the 66 studied patients, 39 were male and 27 were female. the mean age of the patients was 43 ± 17 with a range of 6 - 76 years. implanted sizes of the carbomedics av prosthesis ...

BACKGROUND Tissue engineering represents a promising approach for the development of living heart valve replacements. In vivo animal studies of tissue-engineered autologous heart valves have focused on pulmonary valve replacements, leaving the challenge to tissue engineer heart valves suitable for systemic application using human cells. METHODS AND RESULTS Tissue-engineered human heart valves...

background : prosthetic valve endocarditis (pve) is an important cause of morbidity and mortality associated with heart valve replacement surgery. the aim of the present study was to describe the early outcome of treatment in patients with pve in a single center. methods : the data of all the episodes of pve registered at our institution between 2002 and 2007 were collected and analyzed retrosp...

background: this study was undertaken to compare the outcome in patients with moderate to severe ischemic mitral regurgitation (imr) undergoing coronary artery bypass grafting (cabg) with either mitral valve repair or mitral valve replacement. methods: between march 2002 and february 2005, 49 consecutive patients (mean age: 62.84±8.42 years; mean euroscore: 10.03±3.12) with coronary artery dise...