Cardiac Tumors

00:01 Hi, I'm Joseph Alpert, I'm here to speak with you for a short time about cardiac tumor.

00:07 It turns out that cardiac tumors are not very common.

00:11 Fortunately, the cardiologists are very happy about that and many of them if not, the vast majority are the result of metastatic cancer that has affected the pericardium or the heart and unfortunately, they are associated with a poor prognosis when cancer invades the heart, usually the patient leaves for less than six months.

00:31 Very often they're bloody pericardial effusion is seen that can lead to tamponade and that requires drainage.

00:38 Sometimes we can give drugs or talcum to erase the pericardium so that the effusion doesn’t recur but very often the patient is very sick and doesn’t last very long after discovered.

00:54 There are a few primary malignant tumors they are very rare an example would be a rhabdomyosarcoma, this is something with a very poor prognosis in my long career I've only seen two of these so they're exceptionally rare.

01:08 Not that rare are myxoma which are benign and they usually occur on the left atrium but they can occur in other heart chambers but that’s unusual, the usual place is the left atrium.

01:20 The benign cardiac tumor, the myxoma, can be associated with systemic symptoms that sometimes imitates endocarditis or collagen vascular disease so the patient may have fever, they may have arthralgias, they may have sort of malaise, just feeling sickly and occasionally if the myxoma’s in the left atrium it can block the mitral valve producing a syndrome resembling mitral stenosis and even causing syncope.

01:48 Primary treatment for malignant tumors is of course excision and chemotherapy.

01:53 Generally, these patients do not do well.

01:56 On the other hand, the myxomas or the benign ones, they do usually very well with excision and particularly if the surgeon is careful there's no recurrence of this benign tumor.

02:06 Here we see an Echo to show you the presence of a left atrial myxoma.

02:11 So, here's - I'll orient you - here's the right ventricle, here's the left ventricle - there's the myxoma in the left atrium.

02:18 Thanks very much for being with me for this little presentation on cardiac tumors.