Morphologic aspects of mitral and aortic valve disease
William Clifford Roberts, MD, and Jong Mi Ko, BA
Since no abstract is available, the first 200 words of the article are shown.
Before 1960, the only source for studying the heart was the autopsy. The early years of cardiac valve replacement provided a rich source of necropsy “material” until valve techniques and artificial heart valves became more refined. In the 1950s and 1960s, most physicians attributed valvular heart disease in adults to rheumatic heart disease. During the 1960s and 1970s, many thousands of patients with rheumatic heart disease underwent replacement of one or more cardiac valves. By the 1980s, most of this rheumatic heart disease pool of patients had undergone operation; in addition, the frequency of rheumatic fever and subsequently rheumatic heart disease had dropped dramatically. By the 1970s, the congenitally malformed aortic valve was found to be frequent in adults with aortic stenosis (AS) and mitral valve prolapse (MVP) and was being recognized as a common cause of pure (no associated stenosis) mitral regurgitation (MR). By the 1990s, the frequency of autopsies in US hospitals had dropped enormously compared with the 1950s, and operatively excised cardiac valves were becoming the major source of anatomic study. Although established by the 1980s, cardiac transplantation was rarely performed in patients with valvular heart disease.
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