RESEARCH ARTICLE


Ventricular Free Wall Rupture: Ten Year Survival After Surgical Repair



Richard A Leff*, Irwin Hoffman*
Lovelace Medical Center, Division of Cardiology, 5400 Gibson Blvd, SE, Albuquerque, NM 87108, USA


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Creative Commons License
2008 Bentham Science Publishers Ltd.

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.

* Address correspondence to these authors at the Lovelace Medical Center, Division of Cardiology, 5400 Gibson Blvd, SE, Albuquerque, NM 87108, USA; E-mails: irwin.hoffman@stvin.org ; raleff@gmail.com


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.

Keywords: Ventricular rupture, Long term survival, Surgical repair.