{"id":662,"date":"2008-12-18T09:28:35","date_gmt":"2008-12-18T14:28:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/2008\/12\/18\/unicuspid-aortic-heart-valves\/"},"modified":"2019-02-26T21:54:16","modified_gmt":"2019-02-27T02:54:16","slug":"unicuspid-aortic-heart-valves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/2008\/12\/18\/unicuspid-aortic-heart-valves\/","title":{"rendered":"Trivia: Do Unicuspid Aortic Heart Valves Really Exist?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the most common, congenital heart valve disorders is a bicuspid aortic valve. Patients born with a bicuspid aortic valve have only two leaflets. Normal aortic valves have three leaflets. Ultimately, this can significantly compromise <a href=\"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/2009\/04\/24\/blood-flow-through-the-heart\/\">blood flow through the heart and body<\/a> as the valve tissue degenerates (stenosis, regurgitation).<\/p>\n<p>Earlier today, I received an email from Nikki. I perked up in my chair as I read her email about a unicuspid aortic heart valve.<\/p>\n<p>Nikki writes to me, &#8220;Hi Adam &#8211; I am trying to find out more about my 2-year old heart&#8217;s condition when I came across your site. He has been diagnosed to have a <em>unicuspid aortic heart valve<\/em>. At what age will this start to effect him? Do you have any additional info on this? Greetings from Cape Town, South Africa! Nikki (Mom)&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp; <\/p>\n<div style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Picture Of Unicuspid Heart Valves\" src=\"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/Images\/unicuspid-aortic-heart-valve.jpg\" width=\"432\" height=\"162\" \/><\/div>\n<div style=\"text-align: center;\">Unicuspid Aortic Valves &#8211; Calcified and Narrowed<\/div>\n<p>&nbsp; <\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>You can see what a unicuspid aortic valve looks like in the pictures above. Notice that there is a single cusp which has been severed at the top of the valve. Both of these removed valves were severely calcified.<\/p>\n<p>Unicuspid heart valves are very, very, very rare. In my research, I did not locate any clinical datasets which tracked the disorder and its impact upon patients (by age, by sex, etc.). However, I did find a few, surgical case studies of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/aortic-valve-replacement-surgery.php\">aortic valve replacement patients<\/a> at 26 and 52 years of life. That said, it appears that this disorder can trigger heart valve disease at different times in the patient&#8217;s life.<\/p>\n<p>I hope this helps explain more about <em>unicuspid aortic valves<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Keep on tickin!<br \/>\nAdam<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22300,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aortic-stenosis"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=662"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}