Left ventricular systolic function strongly correlates with afterload after surgical repair of congenital mitral regurgitation in children, suggesting vasodilators may be useful for postoperative cardiac failure.
Afterload reduction may aid LV recovery post-repair in congenital MR; hypothesis-generating in a small case series and should not change practice.
To clarify the contribution of afterload to left ventricular performance after repair of mitral regurgitation, we evaluated echocardiographically 8 children who had undergone surgical repair for isolated congenital mitral regurgitation. We examined the relationship between left ventricular systolic function and preload, afterload, and contractility. The left ventricular systolic function was strongly correlated with the afterload after the surgical repair. In the postoperative state, reducing afterload by vasodilators could be a useful means of treating cardiac failure, in addition to using catecholamines to increase the contractility.
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Murakami et al. (2002) studied this question.
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