Aortic Stenosis and Other Valvular Lesions

AN understanding of the alterations in the gross structure of the heart that occur in various forms of heart disease has, in the past, been dependent primarily on examinations of postmortem specimens. Although this approach has yielded considerable information, there are a number of disadvantages to relying entirely on autopsy material. Postmortem changes distort the details of ventricular configuration significantly and to varying degrees and, as a consequence, the relationships between the dimensions of the ventricular cavity and wall that existed during life can only be surmised. Since postmortem specimens are usually obtained from patients with the end stages of heart disease, the data obtained from such material are not necessarily relevant to patients with less severe forms of heart disease. Finally, the use of postmortem specimens does not usually permit physiologicanatomic correlations, since relatively few hearts become available for study shortly after physiologic investigation. In order to obtain information concerning some of the alterations that occur in the left ventricle in various disease states during life, the thickness of the left ventricular wall and the width of the left ventricular cavity were measured on angiocardiograms. The objectives of this report are to present the results of such measurements in 57 patients and to show the correlations between physiologic changes, determined by left heart catheterization, and of