Abstract: Objective To investigate the anticoagulation effect of warfarin on pregnant women with prosthetic mechanical heart valves during the whole course of pregnancy and their fetuses. Methods Followup survey was carried out on 103 pregnant women with prosthetic mechanical heart valves treated in the Second Xiangya Hospital of Central South University from April 1998 to June 2010. Their age ranged from 19 and 38 years (26.4±3.8 years). All the 103 pregnant women were given oral administration of warfarin during the whole course of pregnancy. The average dose of domestic warfarin was 3.30±0.43 mg/d (87 cases), while the average dose of imported warfarin was 2.90±1.05 mg/d (16 cases). Results None of the patients suffered from serious embolic events. One patient suffered from spontaneous peritoneal hemorrhage. There were 4 cases of intrauterine deaths, and 5 cases of fetal malformation including 1 case of Down’s syndrome and 4 cases of hydrocephalus. Six cases of low birth weight infants and 1 case of ABO hemolytic disease were also found. All the other neonates were healthy with normal weight. No pregnant women suffered from postpartum hemorrhage. Conclusion Oral administration of low dose warfarin (lt;5 mg/d) during the whole course of pregnancy is a relative safe and effective anticoagulation protocol.
Valvular heart disease is a structural or functional disease of the heart due to rheumatic fever, congenital malformation, infection, or trauma, resulting in abnormal cardiac hemodynamics and ultimately heart failure. Implantation of artificial heart valves has become the main way to treat heart valvular disease. Because the structure of the artificial heart valve plays a key role in the stress distribution and hemodynamic performance of the valve and stent, the geometric configuration of the artificial heart valve is constantly updated and improved during its development from mechanical valve to biological valve, which closely mimics the geometric characteristics of the normal natural heart valve. This article sums up the design process of geometric configuration of artificial heart valves and the influence of geometric configuration on the central disc stress and durability of artificial heart valves, analyzes the important parameters of geometric modeling for artificial heart valves, and discusses the development of the corresponding modeling method, to provide reference and new ideas for the biomimetic optimization design of artificial valves.