Word: mitral
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...heart patient has a bottleneck in the mitral valve, it can be opened with a tiny knife on the end of the surgeon's finger. But this daring operation will do little good if the valve to the aorta (main artery) is also narrowed, and there has been no way to repair this second defect. Dr. Charles P. Bailey of Philadelphia, who developed the first operation, now has another for opening the aortic valve: he pushes piano wire into the valve through the heart, and uses it as a guide for a spreader which opens the valve...
Ever since a siege of rheumatic fever at eleven, Mary Dansereau had been facing the prospect of an early death. The mitral valve of her heart had become calcified. To maintain circulation, her damaged heart had to work harder, and it was slowly giving out. For four years she had been a semi-invalid, unable to do much for her two children, and so weak that she took an hour to make...
...Boston's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, surgeons cut into her heart and enlarged the opening of its mitral valve. They anchored a small (½-in.) lucite ball on a steel suture just below the flaps of the valve. The plastic ball can move just enough to allow blood to drain downward into the ventricle. It moves up to act as a stopper in the mitral valve when the heart contracts to pump blood into the aorta...
...patients, Dr. Smithy warned, could benefit from the new operation. The only good candidates are those who are young, suffering from stenosis (narrowing) of the mitral or aortic valves, with no active rheumatic involvement of the heart, and whose general health is good enough to make them reasonable operative risks...