Most common heart-related conditions
- provided by America's leading cardiologists

Heart Valve Disease

Your heart's valves direct blood through your heart's chambers. When any of the valves aren't working properly, therefore, your heart cannot pump blood through the body normally. Some of these conditions are benign, but some may have serious impact on your heart health. Learning about the types of diseases that may affect your valves will help you know when it's time to seek help and what treatments can cure or control your condition.

What is the Prophylaxis for Endocarditis?
Learn what factors may dictate whether you need treatment to prevent an infection in your heart.

Participants:
Jacqueline A. Noonan, MD, FACC
Pediatric cardiologist, University of Kentucky College of Medicine, Lexington, Kentucky

Webcast Transcript:

ANNOUNCER: For those with structural heart disease, and important question is: What is the prophylaxis for endocarditis?

JACQUELINE NOONAN, MD: Well, the prophylaxis for endocarditis is medicine that you take when you are undergoing a procedure that would put you at risk for what we call bacteremia. That is, something happening where there are germs that are likely to get into your blood. And we know now that, if you go into the dentist, and he scrapes all your tartar away or if he pulls your teeth that, if you checked somebody's blood right afterwards, they will find that there are germs in your blood, some bacteria, which usually the body clears. But if you have any kind of structural heart disease, unfortunately, those bacteria, as they're in your bloodstream, might land on this area in your heart and set up housekeeping there, and you could get an infection on your heart, which is called endocarditis.

So it's recommended when you go to the dentist, when you get dental work done, most kinds of dental work, not everything, it's also recommended when you have procedures where they are going to be intubating you, where there might be some risk, where they're going to have urologic procedures.

You don't want to put a lot of people at risk who have very little chance of getting endocarditis from what they're doing and have the chance of perhaps having them have a allergic reaction to the drug, to perhaps having a drug then become resistant when they really need it. So I think most physicians would feel obliged to recommend prophylaxis for somebody with structural heart disease when they undergo invasive procedures of any kind.