Sudden Death Due to Tricuspid Valve Myxoma with Massive Pulmonary Embolism in a 15-Month Old Male

Abstract

Myxomas of the tricuspid valve are extremely rare, with only 13 cases reported in the world literature (1). We report the case of a 15-month old male with tricuspid valve myxoma and massive myxomatous pulmonary emboli discovered at autopsy.

Sudden death due to pulmonary embolism from right atrial myxoma

“…Besides the possible disturbance of the heart activity due to the obstruction of a valve [15], bleedings and fragmentations can occur with subsequent embolism [1, 7, 12,16]. This seems more likely to occur in the left heart, probably because the higher pressures facilitate the fragmentation [19].…”

“…Whilst the majority of the contributions is dealing with complications of inflammatory diseases [3,8], there still exists a considerable number of reports in relation to atherosclerosis [9,10]. More recently, there have also occurred reports with functional dysregulations [20,21] whilst sudden death due to primary heart tumours has been rarely reported [12,14,17,18] Primary cardiac tumours are a rare autopsy finding with a reported prevalence of 0.05% in autopsies [16]. Approximately 50% of them are atrial myxoma [11] that can be identified at the left (75%) or the right (25%) atrium [13].…”

Tricuspid Valve Myxoma: A Case Report and a Collective Review of the Literature

“…Later on, sporadic cases were instantly reported. Careful retrieval by the end of February 2008 had rendered a collection of 50 reported cases of tricuspid valve myxoma by 45 reports in world literature 1‐4,6‐46 . Of them, 34 (75.6%) articles were in English and 11 (24.4%) in non‐English with or without an English abstract.…”

Tumors Associated with Sudden Infant and Childhood Death

“…These lesions cause death by several mechanisms. Tumors of the heart cause sudden death by interfering with cardiac contractility, provoking lethal arrhythmias, or obstructing ventricular outflow [12,[39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49]. Lesions in the brain cause death by generating seizures, obstructing flow of cerebrospinal fluid, space-occupying hemorrhage, or invasion of the respiratory centers [11,15,[50][51][52][53][54].…”