Background The ratio of the transmitral early inflow velocity (E wave) and the tissue Doppler mitral annular velocity (e’ wave) can be used to measure left atrial pressure on the echocardiographic examination. An elevated E/e’ (>15) on echo Doppler is an established measure of elevated LAP. Unlike echo, cardiac MRI (CMR) has no non-invasive measure of LAP. Normally both the atrioventricular val...

S ince the initial description of prosthesispatient mismatch (PPM) more than 3 decades ago (1), the clinical import of PPM after surgical aortic valve replacement (SAVR) has been debated in the surgical published data. The phenotypic manifestation of PPM is an elevated aortic valve gradient after valve implantation. Although a number of indices have been used to characterize the frequency of PP...

BACKGROUND Valve regurgitation has been associated with dexfenfluramine, but its prevalence and severity are uncertain. Additional factors that may contribute to valve regurgitation in patients exposed to this drug are poorly understood. METHODS AND RESULTS Echocardiography was performed on subjects recruited from 26 prescribing sites in 15 states. The total sample of 412 subjects included 17...

The purpose of this work is to evaluate and to compare the acoustic properties of oesophageal voice and voice prosthesis speech production. A group of 14 Italian laryngectomized patients were considered: 7 with oesophageal voice and 7 with tracheoesophageal voice (with phonatory valve). For each patient the spectrogram obtained with the phonation of vowel /a/ (frequency intensity, jitter, shimm...

Primary antiphospholipid syndrome (APS) is a thrombophilic disorder not associated with connective tissue diseases or with autoimmune diseases. We report a 39-year-old female with a mechanical prosthetic mitral valve and a primary antiphospholipid syndrome. Anticoagulation with warfarin was changed for tinzaparine. Four days after the change, the patients was admitted in cardiogenic shock. A tr...

introduction: rheumatic heart disease still remains one of the leading causes of congestive heart failure and death owing to valvular pathologies, in developing countries. valve replacement still remains the treatment of choice in such patients.the aim of this study wasto analyze the postoperative outcome of  double valve replacement (mitral and aortic ) in patients of rheumatic heart disease. ...

BACKGROUND Nonagenarians and centenarians are a rapidly growing segment of the population. No previous study has used a national database to compare outcomes in these patients to those of other groups undergoing cardiac surgical procedures. STUDY DESIGN The Society of Thoracic Surgeons National Database was used to review retrospectively 662,033 patients (5 patients more than 100 years of age...

Transesophageal echocardiography is a crucial tool in intraoperative evaluation of newly implanted/repaired heart valves because suspected valvular malfunction needs to be identified and sometimes surgically corrected. Although color Doppler is often adequate in evaluating the expected regurgitant jets, as well as excluding pathologic paravalvular leaks, spectral Doppler techniques are the most...

infective endocarditis is one of the most severe complications of parenteral drug abuse. the outstanding clinical feature of infective endocarditis in intravenous drug abusers is the high incidence of right-sided valve infection, and the tricuspid valve is involved in 60% to 70% of the cases. we herein report a case of isolated pulmonic valve infective endocarditis with a native pulmonary valve.

BACKGROUND The role of valve surgery in left-sided infective endocarditis has not been evaluated in randomized controlled trials. We examined the association between valve surgery and all-cause 6-month mortality among patients with left-sided infective endocarditis. METHODS AND RESULTS A total of 546 consecutive patients with left-sided infective endocarditis were included. To minimize select...