Impact of Pre-existing Murmur?

[Erin]

Some of my doctors speculate that I might have had a murmur before being diagnosed with PPCM? If I did, how does that factor into things for me? How might that effect my recovery, or will it?

[tabs]

Erin,

It really depends on the seriousness of the murmur. Most murmurs are just a little bit of leaking blood flowing through the valves of the heart. If it were serious, your cardios would be talking about valve problems and they have there own complications.

I have a slight murmur and it is never even talked about.

Hope that helps,
Twilah

[Erin]

Thanks for the reply, Twilah. Actually, the week before I was diagnosed with CHF and PPCM, the hospitalist attending to me said that after consulting with a cardiologist about my situation, they diagnosed me as having mitral valve regurgitation and said that I would eventually have to have a valve replaced. They said that depending on how I recovered over the next few months, it would be 10-20 years until replacement would be necessary, worst case senario, and at best, maybe 30-40. How might this play into the PPCM and my recovery, or is there any way to answer that at this point?

[JAMESFETT]

Mitral valve leakage (murmur) is very common with PPCM, and is due to stretching the valve ring from the dilatation of the left ventricle. That improves with healing when the size of the left ventricle returns to normal or near-normal size, and is not of hemodynamic significance. Perhaps it is that your hospitalist heard a week before your diagnosis of PPCM. If so, at that point an echo would have confirmed PPCM (i.e. a dilated cardiomyopathy). On the other hand if you had some pre-existing abnormality of the mitral valve (would show as anatomically deformed valve on Doppler echo) or even a normal-variant mitral valve prolapse, that would be different from PPCM. In this latter case, the mitral regurgitation murmur could be of more significance, and could require extra work, as you have indicated, many years down the road. So what you want to know is which type of mitral murmur is it: a)just from stretching with size change or b)anatomically abnormal valve.

JDF

[Erin]

Ah, thank you for the clarification. That will help me ask my cardiologist better questions.