Rheumatic heart disease (RHD) is the most common cause of acquired heart disease in children and young adults worldwide and particularly developing countries continuing to experience a high incidence of this disease. The unexpected increase in the incidence of the disease in certain areas may explain the clinical and epidemiological characteristics of this disease. The key manifestation of RHD ...

OBJECTIVES To identify risk factors associated with cardiac valve calcification that is easily detectable through routine blood tests in patients who received valve replacement therapy. METHODS Four hundred patients with valvular heart disease who underwent valve replacement surgery between December 2009 and January 2013 were enrolled in this study. Of these, 77 had valve calcification; the o...

rheumatic heart disease is a serious health problem in developing countries. the present study was conducted to evaluate clinical and echocardiographic findings of mitral stenosis and their relationship with patients functional classes. we studied records of 400 patients with symptomatic mitral stenosis (71% female, mostly in 20s or 30s and 54% function class ii) treated in two hospitals in teh...

Background: A thorough understanding of the Rheumatic Heart disease is important to aid in the management of patients with RHD. We hereby thus study various presentations, distributions, clinical profile of various types of valvular involvement in patients with RHD, complications of RHD such as heart failure, arrhythmias, chamber dilation, thromboembolic manifestation, pulmonary hypertension et...

High-throughput metabolomics techniques are a useful tool to understand many disease conditions including cardiovascular such as valvular heart disease(s) (VHD). VHD involves damage valves, mostly presenting stenosis, regurgitation or prolapse and can be classified into degenerative, rheumatic, congenital, prosthetic valve disease. Gaps remain in our understanding of the pathogenesis common VHD...

Infective endocarditis is an uncommon heart disease with a variable incidence, mostly related to the ever-increasing development of cardiac surgery and the longer survival of patients with congenital heart disease (CHD). Thirty-seven episodes of infective endocarditis (IE) were evaluated in 36 children (under 15 years of age) admitted to hospitals affiliated to Shiraz University of Medical ...

Percutaneous Mitral Commissurotomy Rheumatic mitral stenosis continues to be endemic in developing countries, where mitral stenosis is the most frequent valve disease.1 Although the prevalence of rheumatic fever has greatly decreased in Western countries, it continues to represent an important clinical entity because of outmigration from developing countries. The figure given by the registry Eu...

BACKGROUND Echocardiography has been proposed as a method to screen children for rheumatic heart disease. The World Heart Federation has established guidelines for echocardiographic screening. In this study, we describe a rapid echocardiogram screening protocol according to the World Heart Federation guidelines in Samoa, endemic for rheumatic heart disease. METHODS We performed echocardiogram...