What can you tell us about your practice? I work at the University Hospital of Lille in Lille, France, which is a tertiary referral center offering medical services to more than 5 million people. I run an “aortic center” together with my colleagues—cardiothoracic and vascular surgeons, interventional radiologists, and cardiologists. We believe that this multidisciplinary approach is mandatory t...

Bicuspid aortic valve (BAV) represents the most common cardiac congenital malformation in the adult age, with strong male predominance. It may occur in isolation, or in association with other congenital heart diseases. The BAV is seen in 1% to 2% of the population and may be complicated by aortic stenosis or aortic insufficiency and infective endocarditis. It may be associated with abnormalitie...

Recent studies have confirmed a close association between various medical conditions (intracranial aneurysm, abdominal aortic aneurysm, temporal arteritis, autoimmune disorder, renal cysts), certain aortic anatomic variants (bovine aortic arch, direct origin of left vertebral artery from aortic arch, bicuspid aortic valve), and family history of aneurysm disease with thoracic aortic aneurysm an...

BACKGROUND Although atrial fibrillation (AF), a common arrhythmia, frequently presents in patients with underlying valvular disease, its hemodynamic contributions are not fully understood. The present work aimed to computationally study how physical conditions imposed by pathologic valvular anatomy act on AF hemodynamics. METHODS We simulated AF with different severity grades of left-sided va...

BACKGROUND Cardiac valvular diseases contribute to >42,000 deaths yearly in the United States, but the role of genetics in these deaths is unknown. This study evaluated the familiality of death resulting from aortic, mitral, and all valvular diseases using a population-based genealogy linked to death records. METHODS AND RESULTS The Utah Population Database contains >2 million individual reco...

Bicuspid aortic valve is traditionally considered an innocuous congenital anomaly. Due to a better and widespread availability of non-invasive imaging techniques, it has come to the fore that 30% of these cases develop complications, viz., valve abnormality (aortic regurgitation and stenosis), and aneurysm of aortic root and ascending aorta. Sinus of Valsalva aneurysm is an uncommon complicatio...

BACKGROUND Aortic thrombosis is a rare disease and only a few cases of the disease, especially associated with chemotherapy for malignant diseases and/or blood diseases, have been previously reported. Although Virchow's triad for thrombogenesis, namely hypercoagulability, blood flow stasis, and vessel wall injury, is the major factor promoting the formation of thrombosis, the detailed mechanism...

Aortic aneurysms are relatively common maladies that may lead to the devastating consequence of aortic rupture. AAAs (abdominal aortic aneurysms) and TAAs (thoracic aortic aneurysms) are two common forms of aneurysmal diseases in humans that appear to have distinct pathologies and mechanisms. Despite this divergence, there are numerous and consistent demonstrations that overactivation of the RA...

OBJECTIVE To review the results of endovascular treatment of acute thoracic aortic diseases in a group of Chinese patients. DESIGN Retrospective study. SETTING A tertiary referral hospital with a cardiothoracic surgery service. PATIENTS All 15 patients presenting with acute thoracic aortic diseases between September 2001 and October 2005 inclusive, of whom eight had traumatic rupture, fou...