Drosophila harbours a simple tubular heart that ensures haemolymph circulation within the body. The heart is built by a few different cell types, including cardiomyocytes that define the luminal heart channel and ostia cells that constitute openings in the heart wall allowing haemolymph to enter the heart chamber. Regulation of flow directionality within a tube, such as blood flow in arteries o...

Heart valve formation initiates when endothelial cells of the heart transform into mesenchyme and populate the cardiac cushions. The transcription factor SOX9 is highly expressed in the cardiac cushion mesenchyme, and is essential for heart valve development. Loss of Sox9 in mouse cardiac cushion mesenchyme alters cell proliferation, embryonic survival, and valve formation. Despite this importa...

The genetic mucopolysaccharidosis syndromes (MPS) are autosomal recessive inborn errors of metabolism. Heart valve involvement in MPS is not uncommon but only a few case reports of successful cardiac surgery are available. In particular, reports of combined aortic and mitral stenosis associated with MPS type I-S are very rare. Both type I and type VI MPS are associated with significant left sid...

right atrial dilation due to left heart disease is a common complication among adults. the present review aimed to describe a case of massively dilated right atrium in a female patient presenting with valvular heart disease and no atrial fibrillation. the results of chest x-ray revealed a large opacity filling the lower right hemithorax, falsely interpreted as a mediastinal mass. during the tra...

  Background: Embolus is one of the causes of ischemic stroke that can be due to cardiac sources such as valvular heart diseases and atrial fibrillation and atheroma of the aorta. Transesophageal echocardiography (TEE) is superior in identifying potential cardiac sources of emboli. Due to insufficient data on TEE findings in ischemic stroke in Iran, the present study was done to evaluate TEE in...

Artificial valve replacement is a common procedure in case of heart valve disorders treatment. The main task of this prosthesis is to generate blood flow similar to flow generated by natural, human valve. Velocity distribution depends mainly on the geometry of the valve. That is why it should be analysed and modified in case to obtain the best results. The objective of this study was to numeric...

BACKROUND Transcatheter pulmonary valve replacement is currently performed in clinical trials, however limited by the use of glutaraldehyde treated bioprostheses. This feasibility study was performed to evaluate delivery-related tissue distortion during implantation of a tissue engineered (TE) heart valves. MATERIAL AND METHOD The injectable TE heart valve was mounted on a self-expanding niti...

BACKGROUND Tissue-engineered or decellularized heart valves have already been implanted in humans or are currently approaching the clinical setting. The aim of this study was to examine the migratory response of human monocytic cells toward decellularized porcine and human heart valves, a pivotal step in the early immunologic reaction. METHODS AND RESULTS Porcine and human pulmonary valve con...

Heart valve (HV) culture is one of the major Duke criteria for the diagnosis of definite infectious endocarditis (IE). However, previous series suggest that heart valve culture does not have good sensitivity (7.8 to 17.6%) and may be contaminated during manipulation. Our goal was to establish the value of routine cultures of heart valves in patients with and without IE. From 2004 to 2006, resec...

j-Ieart size was measured radiographically before and after single or double homograft valve replacement in 69 consecutive patients. Thirty patients had aortic valve replacement, 25 mitral, and 14 both aortic and mitral valve replacement. For aortic valve replacement a fresh unsupported homograft was inserted in the subcoronary position, while for mitral valve replacement afresh semilunar homog...