No abstract

The Freestyle valve in the pulmonary position in a congenital population is associated with low medium-term incidences of SVD and reintervention. It performs equally well to the homograft when a conduit is required and can be considered a valid alternative to stented bioprostheses when PVR alone is required.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest reported series of anomalous RCA managed by surgical reimplantation. Our results suggest that this technique is safe and has excellent medium to long-term results regarding symptom-free survival.

The mean age was 50.5 years. Nine (10.5%) of these patients had Prosthetic Valve Endocarditis, the remaining 76 (89.5%) had Native Valve Endocarditis. Twenty-nine percent of patients were NYHA 4 pre-operatively, 15% of patients were haemodynamically unstable requiring inotropic support, 34% were persistently febrile despite antibiotic therapy, and 48% had suffered any embolic event, 20% suffered cerebral emboli. The commonest causative organism in our series was Staphylococcus Aureus (54.1%) with 2.3% of cases being due to MRSA. The second commonest organism isolated was Streptococcus spp. at 21.1%. Operative mortality was 12.9%, of which on-table mortality was 2.2%. Mean follow-up was 56 months (range 1-151). Early recurrence rates (<3 months) were 2.3%. Late recurrence was 7.0%. The pre-operative factors associated with increased mortality were age over 65, inotropic requirement, uncontrolled sepsis and cerebral emboli. We summarise our experience and recommendations for a team approach to the management of infective endocarditis.

Bilateral simultaneous elbow dislocations are extremely rare and have only been described in 12 cases. In the paediatric population unilateral elbow dislocations are rare with 3-6% of all elbow injuries and there are only few studies describing this injury exclusively in children. There is only one case report of a paediatric patient who sustained a simultaneous bilateral elbow dislocation with medial epicondyle fractures. We present a second paediatric case of simultaneous bilateral elbow dislocation with associated displaced bilateral medial epicondyle fractures in a gymnast with joint hyperlaxity (3 of 5 Wynne-Davies criteria) treated with closed reduction and short-term immobilisation (3 weeks). The patient returned to full trampoline gymnastics between 4 and 5 months postinjury and made an uneventful recovery.