General thoracic and cardiovascular surgery
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Bicuspid aortic valve related aortopathy is known to significantly increase the risk for catastrophic aortic events and, therefore, represents a considerable health burden. Albeit of ongoing research in this field including genetic, molecular, hemodynamic and morphologic aspects, bicuspid aortic valve related aortopathy still represents an imperfectly understood disorder. This lack in knowledge results in a lack of consistency considering different therapeutic approaches. ⋯ In this context, there is evidence that regurgitation of bicuspid aortic valves is the more fatal pathomechanism. Furthermore, "age" represents an aspect that should be taken into account when deciding whether to replace the aorta or not, because the diameter depends mainly on a patients age. The same diameter of the aorta in a 70-year old and a 20-year old patient has to be interpreted differently and should, therefore, result in different therapeutic strategies.
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Gen Thorac Cardiovasc Surg · Jan 2019
ReviewReflection of pioneers: redo thoracoabdominal aortic aneurysm repair controversies in thoracic aortic aneurysm surgery.
Reoperative thoracoabdominal aortic aneurysm repair is frequently necessary and brings with it a unique set of challenges. Typically, most reoperative repairs are necessitated by aortic disease progressing into previously healthy aortic tissue from a replaced section of the aorta (an extension of the previous repair) or, to a lesser degree, because of a late complication of prior distal aortic repair (an open or endovascular repair failure). ⋯ Since the introduction of endovascular repair for aortic aneurysms, indications for open repair have become more specific and limited; many centers have justified using endovascular approaches in patients with prior open aortic repair by deeming these patients "high risk" because of their previous incision. Our analysis found that reoperative repairs were not typically subject to worse early outcomes than patients without prior distal aortic repair, except for the more complicated types of reoperation, which involve infection.
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Gen Thorac Cardiovasc Surg · Jan 2019
PRO-CON debate: valve sparing aortic root surgery. PRO: reimplantation.
The remodeling and the reimplantation procedures were described more than 25 years ago with the aim of sparing, otherwise normal aortic valve in the presence of a root aneurysm. Because of its ability to reconstruct the sinuses of Valsalva, the remodeling procedure was considered to be more physiological than the reimplantation. ⋯ In this way, both procedures can now guarantee an anatomical root reconstruction and an increased long-term durability. Today preference for a reimplantation procedure is based on the perception of a better reproducibility of the surgical procedure, an increased procedural safety due to the characteristic hemostatic feature of this surgical approach, and to a much larger amount of data present in the literature on long-term results.