Mitral valve replacement gradually to regain strength. Patients who have physically demanding jobs will have to wait a little longer than those who don’t. Patients are also restricted from driving a car for six weeks after the surgery. Once a person has a mitral valve procedure, they are required to have prophylactic antibiotics as a preventative measure against infection whenever they have dental work done. Some scarring occurs after surgery. For median sternotomy (access through the sternum, or breastbone), the patient will have a vertical scar on the anterior chest above the sternum. If the heart is accessed from under the left breast
Mitral insufficiency of the regurgitant flow at the level of the valve. This is known as the regurgitant orifice area, and correlates with the size of the defect in the mitral valve. One particular echocardiographic technique used to measure the orifice area is measurement of the proximal isovelocity surface area (PISA). The flaw of using PISA to determine the mitral valve regurgitant orifice area is that it measures the flow at one moment in time in the cardiac cycle, which may not reflect the average performance of the regurgitant jet. The treatment of mitral insufficiency depends on the acuteness of the disease