Surgery for cardiac myxoma A 20-year experience with long-term follow-up

Abstract

Data on 32 consecutive patients undergoing resection of a cardiac myxoma over a 20-year period (1971-1991) was analyzed. The mean age of the patients was 57 +/- 11 years (range 36 to 78). All myxomas were located in the left atrium except one right ventricular tumor. Ten of the atrial resections were performed with only an endocardial cuff while a full thickness atrial septum cuff was removed in 21 cases. One patient, operated under emergency conditions, died 11 days later as a result of cardiac and pulmonary failure (hospital mortality 3.1%). Late follow-up (mean 6.4 +/- 4.4 years) shows excellent results. All patients are alive and well. No recurrences have been found. In this series, good long-term results were obtained by simple excision of cardiac myxomas. This finding supports the theory that recurrence is mainly confined to patients with familial presentation and/or myxoma complex.

The Challenge Presented by Right Atrial Myxoma

“…The age of all reported individuals varied much more extensively: between 1 month and 81 years. Of a population of 644 patients, 64.6% were female and 35.4% male [2,7,8,15,31,32,37,47,52,57,59,65,70,71,73,78,80]. Three studies with a cumulative total of 154 individuals report an overall fraction of familial cardiac myxomas of 4.5% within a range from 0 to 5.7% [8,23,30].…”

Right Atrial Trans-Septal Approach for Left Atrial Myxomas—Nine-Year Experience

“…Interestingly, 34-85% had a subendocardial, not fullthickness, resection of the interatrially based tumor. 12,13 This approach prevents inspection of all four cardiac chambers. In addition left atriotomy alone requires excessive manipulation of the tumor and, depending on the size…”

Mechanical thrombectomy in cardiac myxoma stroke: a case report and review of the literature

“…It is also recommended bedside echocardiography routinely to avoid delayed diagnosis in young stroke patients [13,17]. The estimated incidence of myxomarelated stroke ranged from 10 to 30 % of patients [7,9].…”