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...

introduction brucella endocarditis, although an uncommon complication of brucellosis, is the main cause of the mortality related to this disease. the best therapy is a combination of antibiotic administration with valve replacement. after treatment of the first episode of endocarditis, new infection may be occurred as a relapse or reinfection. case presentation in this report, we described a pa...

OBJECTIVE In the surgical treatment of acute aortic valve infective endocarditis (IE), the long-term outcome depending on the choice of valve replacement remains uncertain. We aimed to compare the impact on 5-year mortality of use of three types of implanted valves: bioprosthesis (heterograft), mechanical prosthesis and homograft. METHODS A total of 167 patients with a definite aortic valve I...

Supplementary data associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.ejcts.2007.02.008. Fig. 1. The view of On-X valve from ascending aorta in systole and diastole. Surface of the mechanical valve leaflets could be seen clearly without contrast medium. They opened symmetrically and the opening angle of this artificial valve was appropriate. Fig. 2. The motion of...

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...

Thrombosis of a mechanical prosthetic valve is a serious and fortunately it is a rare complication of cardiac valve replacement. We present a case of prosthetic mechanical valve On-X 31/33 mm thrombosis thrombus size 8 x 14 mm on a mitral position, which was treated with a successful intravenous thrombolytic therapy of streptokinase infusion over 10 hours repeated twice with no complications.