Adam’s Heart Valve Surgery Blog

It’s time for another “True or False” quiz… That said, is the following statement true or false?

The American Heart Association just reported that twice as many Americans are hospitalized with heart failure today compared to 25 years ago.

Continue reading this post »

The older I get… The more I realize there are no short-cuts in the game of life. Whether it deals with money or weight loss, the “sure thing” is seldom a sure thing.

An unfortunate example… A new study published by BMC Medical just revealed some disastrous findings about the use of Fen-Phen for weight loss and its long-term side effect… Heart valve damage known as mitral regurgitation and aortic regurgitation.

To learn more, read this interesting article by WebMD Health News by clicking “Fen-Phen Damages Heart Valves… Several Years Later”.

Keep on tickin!

P.S. To leave a comment, please click here.

About The Author: Adam Pick is a double, heart valve surgery patient and author of The Patient’s Guide To Heart Valve Surgery, a unique book which integrates the clinical facts of heart valve surgery with the personal experiences of 78 former valve surgery patients. To learn more about Adam and his heart valve surgery book, click here.

Two critical questions for patients needing heart valve replacement - due to aortic stenosis, mitral valve prolapse and/or regurgitation - are, “How long does a valve replacement last?” and “Will I need a reoperation?”

While there are many different answers to that question, here is some very interesting information specific to St. Jude Medical’s Biocor™ Stented Tissue Valve. According to St. Jude Medical, this pig valve replacement provided excellent long-term durability for the aortic valve in patients 65 years and older.

Continue reading this post »

I was just reading a rather frightening article about women, cardiologists and heart disease at the Dayton Daily News.

I was shocked to read a few statistics about the the incredibly large number of women that have cardiovascular disease. Furthermore, the annual mortality rate from heart disease was equally disturbing.

Continue reading this post »

The genetic links of heart valve disease (aortic stenosis, mitral prolapse) are fairly well documented.

As the Children’s Hospital Boston finds, “Some congenital heart defects may have a genetic link, either occurring due to a defect in a gene, a chromosome abnormality, or environmental exposure, causing heart problems to occur more often in certain families.” More specifically, a recent study suggests, “Having a first-degree relative with mitral valve disease was found to increase the risk by 2.5 times.”

So you know, my Uncle Mooney had valve replacement surgery over 30 years before my aortic surgery. And, my Grandpa Zim (who has passed on) had heart trouble which resulted in a quadruple bypass. For this reason, I perked up in my chair when I received a very interesting email from Ed in Virginia.

Here is Ed’s email…

Continue reading this post »