Pericardial effusion is a common finding in everyday clinical practice. The first challenge to the clinician is to try to establish an etiologic diagnosis. Sometimes, the pericardial effusion can be easily related to a known underlying disease, such as acute myocardial infarction, cardiac surgery, end-stage renal disease or widespread metastatic neoplasm. When no obvious cause is apparent, some...

left ventricular free wall rupture is responsible for up to 10% of in-hospital deaths following myocardial infarction. it is mainly associated with posterolateral myocardial infarction, and its antemortem diagnosis is rarely made. one of the medical complications of myocardial infarction is the rupture of the free wall, which occurs more frequently in the anterolateral wall in hypertensives, wo...

Cardiac tamponade is a recognised complication of blunt trauma to the chest. It usually presents at the time of the acute event but there are rare cases of delayed presentations. We present such a case where the tamponade occurred six weeks following the trauma to the chest wall.

Acute aortic dissection usually presents with severe chest and/or back pain but may have a varied presentation ranging from syncope, stroke, and heart failure to shock or tamponade. We present classic chest computed tomography images of a case of type A aortic dissection presenting with cardiac tamponade.

BACKGROUND Low-pressure cardiac tamponade is a form of cardiac tamponade in which a comparatively low pericardial pressure results in cardiac compression because of low filling pressure. This syndrome is poorly characterized because only isolated cases have been reported. We conducted a study of its clinical and hemodynamic profiles. METHODS AND RESULTS From 1986 through 2004, we evaluated al...

We present a case of cardiac tamponade associated with placement of a central venous catheter (CVC) via a peripheral vein in a 14-year-old girl with idiopathic scoliosis undergoing corrective surgery. A number of complications have been described in association with CVC misplacement. Sporadic cases of cardiac tamponade from this have been reported, but the actual incidence is unknown. Death fro...

BACKGROUND Cardiac tamponade is the most dramatic complication observed during atrial fibrillation (AF) ablation and the leading cause of procedure-related mortality. Female sex is a known risk factor for complications during AF ablation; however, it is unknown whether women have a higher risk of tamponade. METHODS AND RESULTS A systematic Medline search was used to locate academic electrophy...