Echocardiography in Valvular Heart Disease
In This Video
- Judy Wei-Ming Hung, MD, is the director of Echocardiograpy in Massachusetts General Hospital's Cardiology Division
- She was co-chair of a recent set of joint guidelines on severe aortic stenosis
- Here, she discusses her focus on mitral regurgitation and a novel algorithm for diagnosing the condition
Mitral regurgitation is a condition in which blood flows backward in the heart due to failure of the mitral valve to completely close. When severe, the condition can require hospitalization and may be fatal.
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Judy Wei-Ming Hung, MD, director of Echocardiography in the Division of Cardiology, is focused on the diagnosis and treatment of mitral regurgitation. In this video, she discusses an algorithm for approaching and diagnosing the condition that she developed as part of a recent set of joint guidelines for severe aortic stenosis.
Transcript
My area of research is in valve disease and I've always found valvular heart to be the most interesting from a physiologic standpoint. It also is well-diagnosed with using imaging which is my specialty, echocardiography. So it's been a great way to combine my interest in cardiovascular physiology and imaging.
Well my area of research is on mitral regurgitation, which is a leak across the valve and specifically, this type of leak across the valve occurs after heart attacks. It's a very common cause of morbidity and mortality following heart attacks and results in a lot of hospitalizations and deaths. It's interesting physiologically and to assess why folks or why patients after heart attacks develop mitral regurgitation, and it's also been very interesting in terms of trying to figure out better ways to treat this problem.
So I was honored to be the co-chair of a recent joint guidelines published by the American Society of Echo and the European Cardiovascular Imaging Society on severe aortic stenosis. And this guideline focused on the echocardiographic assessment of severe aortic stenosis and it put forth a new classification scheme for severe aortic stenosis as well as an algorithm in how do we approach and diagnose this important valvular heart disease.
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