doi:10.1155/2012/478259 Review Article Relation of Bicuspid Aortic Valve Morphology to the Dilatation

Copyright © 2012 Evaldas Girdauskas et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Whether the dilatation of proximal aorta in patients with bicuspid aortic valve is secondary to hemodynamic effects related to the abnormal aortic valve or a primary manifestation of the genetic disorder remains controversial. We discuss in this paper the recent data on the BAV function and transvalvular flow patterns in relation with the dilatation type of the proximal aorta. Different morphological forms of bicuspid aortic valve in relation with the specific transvalvular blood flow patterns are focus of the first paragraph of this paper. In the second part of this paper we present the pathogenetic insight into the different clinically observed phenotypes of bicuspid aortic valve disease (i.e., association of proximal aortic shapes with the specific cusp fusion patterns), based on the data from recent rheological studies. 1