Percutaneous heart valve replacement is currently limited to the replacement of pulmonary and aortic valves in a targeted group of patients. Designing a heart valve for mitral valve replacement is further limited by its distinctive anatomical feature, which places a constraint on its range of design options. To overcome such limitations, the objectives of this study were to use computational mo...

surgery for heart diseases during pregnancy, especially necessitating cardiopulmonary bypass, is believed to trigger maternal and fetal risks and should be performed only when medical therapy has been unsuccessful to alleviate the cardiac decompensation. a 33-year-old pregnant woman in her 33rd week of gestation was admitted to our hospital. she had rheumatic mitral valvular stenosis and had un...

Heart valve replacement is a common cardiac surgical procedure used to treat native valvular diseases such as aortic and mitral stenosis and regurgitation. These procedures reduce the morbidity and mortality associated with diseased native valves and yet come at the expense of prosthetic valve complications. Structural valve degeneration is one such complication. We present a case of a critical...

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...

BACKGROUND The effect of adenosine postconditioning on myocardial protection in cardiac surgery remains uncertain. The present study evaluated the safety, feasibility, and beneficial effect of adenosine postconditioning as an adjunct to predominantly used cold-blood cardioplegic myocardial protection method in the setting of heart valve replacement operations. METHODS Sixty patients with rheu...

BACKGROUND The CardioMEMS Heart Failure System is a well validated tool to optimize management of systolic and diastolic heart failure and has been shown to reduce the risk of hospitalization by 37%. We are reporting a unique case of acute aortic valve insufficiency as a first sign of endocarditis, detected early in a patient with the CardioMEMS device. CASE REPORT A 79-year-old man with dual b...

Editorial Heart valve surgery in the United Kingdom: present practice and future trends The surgery of heart valve disease raises many questions. Should we conserve or replace the diseased valve? What should the replacement valve be-a homograft, a biopros-thetic valve, or a mechanical valve? Isn't valve disease becoming less common anyway? Test reports, clinical comparisons, and longitudinal fo...

Rheumatoid aortic valve disease is uncommon. and there are few reports of valve replacement in this condition. Aortic valve replacement and partial pericardiectomy was performed in a patient with acute rheumatoid aortitis and aortic incompetence. Previous reports suggest that any patient with rheumatoid arthritis who develops cardiac symptoms should be carefully assessed for surgically treatabl...

transcatheter aortic valve replacement (tavr) is a novel therapeutic intervention for the replacement of severely stenotic aortic valves in high-risk patients for standard surgical procedures. since the initial partner trial results, use of tavr has been on the rise each year. new delivery methods and different valves have been developed and modified in order to promote the minimally invasive p...

BACKGROUND Few studies have reported population-based outcomes for aortic valve replacement patients. METHODS Patients with severe aortic valve stenosis who underwent aortic valve replacement with or without concomitant coronary artery bypass graft surgery from January 1, 2003, to December 31, 2005, were included in the study. Statistical models were developed to identify significant risk fac...