doctor+Interview

  Laura's Doctor Interview I had a Interview with a doctor I know in San antonio that took care of me when I had heart valve disease.   What kinds of heart valve diseases are there ??? There are four valves in the heart: the aortic valve, the pulmonary valve, the tricuspid valve and the mitral valve. Valves do two things: they open and they close. Valves can be formed abnormally from birth or there are infectious diseases, like rheumatic fever, that can damage valves after birth. Some valves don't develop at all, called atresia. Otherwise, valve problems affect how they open, where they don't open fully (stenosis), or they don't close well, so they leak (regurgitation or insufficiency). Your aortic valve didn't form normally, so it didn't open well. It was treated with a balloon procedure that made it open better. Eventually, it started to leak until it needed to be replaced. How do you know when someone has heart valve disease??? An abnormal valve usually makes a noise, called a murmur. If your regular doctor hears a murmur, they will call a cardiologist, who can do an ultrasound of the heart to determine which valve is not working well.

What sorts of tools and machines do you use on paients to see how there doing??? We use a stethoscope to examine the patient to listen to their heart. We use an EKG machine to look at the electrical activity of the heart, which is printed on a piece of paper and looks like a bunch of squiggly lines. We use an echo machine to get an ultrasound of the heart, which lets us look at the heart while it is moving, and see how it functions. This is called an echocardiogram, or an "echo". We can also get a CAT scan of the heart, which is a very fancy x-ray, and gives us even more information on the blood vessels and the heart.

What kinds of treatments help heart valve disese??? There are no medicines or diets that can change a valve once it is abnormal. We use medicines to help the body to better handle the extra work that an abnormal valve places on the body. Once a valve problem is severe enough, we can do either a heart catheterization (like you had when you were a baby) to use balloons to open up narrowed valves; or, we can do surgery to either repair or replace the valve.