Death Due to Swelling of Ball Component of Aortic Ball-Valve Prosthesis

Abstract

ALTHOUGH implantable vascular prostheses of a conduit type – such as arterial grafts – have a long and fairly honorable history, that of cardiac valvular prostheses is much shorter and, it would seem, somewhat less honorable. Perhaps the major difficulty, once the valve has been successfully inserted, has been the tendency to thrombus formation, frequently with embolic sequelae. The incidence of actual mechanical failure of the prosthetic device has not been high. The purpose of this note is to describe a patient who died twenty months after an aortic ball-valve prosthesis had been implanted to correct aortic regurgitation. At autopsy . . .