RESEARCH ARTICLE
Ventricular Free Wall Rupture: Ten Year Survival After Surgical Repair
Richard A Leff*, Irwin Hoffman*
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2008Volume: 2
First Page: 1
Last Page: 2
Publisher ID: TOCMJ-2-1
DOI: 10.2174/1874192400802010001
Article History:
Received Date: 7/9/2007Revision Received Date: 21/9/2007
Acceptance Date: 27/9/2007
Electronic publication date: 22/1/2008
Collection year: 2008
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/), which permits unrestrictive use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
Ventricular free wall rupture is a devastating complication of acute myocardial infarction. It occurs in 15-25% of fatal cases. However, the overall incidence in acute MI cases is about 2%. [1] Clinical markers suggesting free wall rupture include pulseless electrical activity in a first MI, and pericardial tamponade. Subacute rupture takes hours or days to develop, and is suggested clinically by pericardial pain, transient hypotension, nausea, restlessness and agitation. [2, 3] When the diagnosis is established by pericardiocentesis or echocardiography, surgical patch repairs are possible, using standard or even sutureless technique. [4] The long term course of survivors of free wall rupture repair has not been extensively reported. There are scattered reports in the literature of survival up to eight years. [5, 3] We report herein a case of a status freewall rupture from an inferior-posterior wall myocardial infarction with survival of ten years after surgical repair. We believe this to be the longest survival thus far reported in the literature.
