BACKGROUND It is suggested that in young adults the Ross procedure results in better late patient survival compared with mechanical prosthesis implantation. We performed a propensity score-matched study that assessed late survival in young adult patients after a Ross procedure versus that after mechanical aortic valve replacement with optimal self-management anticoagulation therapy. METHODS A...

IMPORTANCE In nonelderly patients with mitral disease requiring valve replacement, deciding between bioprosthetic and mechanical prosthetic valves is challenging because long-term survival and morbidity are not well defined. OBJECTIVE To quantify survival and major morbidity after mitral valve replacement in patients aged 50 to 69 years. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Retrospective cohor...

The first mechanical heart valve prosthesis, designed by Dr Charles Hufnagel, was implanted to the descending aorta of a 30-year-old woman with severe aortic regurgitation in 1952.1 Eight years after the initial successful prosthetic valve implantation, Dr Harken sutured a prosthetic valve (Starr Edwards Valve) to the aortic annulus after removing the diseased native valve. During the ensuing y...

Mechanical and thermal modelling of the first normally-closed Parylene valve operating on electrothermal principles for rapid and wireless drug delivery was investigated. The modelling and experimental results confirm the mechanical robustness of the valve membrane. Valve opening behavior obtained by transient thermal finite element analysis are in accordance with the experimental microscopic i...

transcatheteraortic valve implantation, first introduced in 2002, has been established as an alternative modality for patients deemed not suitable for open-heart surgery. the anatomical vicinity of the atrioventricular node and the his bundle to the non-coronary and rightcoronary aortic cusps predisposes patients to conduction abnormalities in case of severe calcification or mechanical trauma d...

OBJECTIVE Cardiac surgical mortality has improved during the last decade despite the aging of the population. An integrated US health plan developed a heart valve registry to track outcomes and complications of heart valve operations. This database was used for longitudinal evaluation of mitral valve (MV) outcomes from 1999 to 2008 at four affiliated hospitals. METHODS We identified 3130 pati...

Current guidelines necessitate varying degrees of long-term anticoagulation in patients with mechanical heart valve(s) to prevent thrombotic and embolic complications. We describe a patient with a functioning aortic mechanical valve without anticoagulation for 23 years. A 68-year-old man had an aortic valve (St Jude Medical) replacement in 1984. His native valve was incompetent from infective e...

OBJECTIVE In cases of aortic valve replacement, the downstream flow profile and turbulence in the ascending aorta differ according to the prosthetic aortic valve implanted. The objective of this work is to study the influence of prosthetic valve type on the flow in the bypass grafts implanted to the ascending aorta in cases of concomitant aortic valve replacement and coronary artery bypass. M...

Recently, cavitation on the surface of mechanical heart valves has been studied as a cause of fractures occurring in implanted mechanical heart valves. The cause of cavitation in mechanical heart valves was investigated using the 25 mm Medtronic Hall valve and the 23 mm Omnicarbon valve. Closing of these valves in the mitral position was simulated in an electrohydraulic totally artificial heart...

BACKGROUND The West African sub-region has poor health infrastructure. Mechanical valve replacement in children from such regions raises important postoperative concerns; among these, valve-related morbidity and complications of lifelong anticoagulation are foremost. Little is known about the long-term outcome of mechanical valve replacement in West Africa. We sought to determine the outcome of...