[Home monitoring of patients after prosthetic valve replacement. Early detection of valve dysfunction].

Despite enormous progress concerning material and design, patients with artificial heart valves still face a considerable risk of serious complications (e.g., hemorrhage, thromboemboli, redos) which sum up to 4.9-22.4% for the first 10 postoperative years depending on type and position of the implanted prosthetic valve. Nowadays, technical defects of mechanical valves are negligible and relevant complications are rather a consequence of long-term anticoagulation therapy. To avoid these complications, the authors consider a strict control of both the anticoagulation therapy and the functional integrity of the prosthetic valve to be inevitable. Therefore, with the aim of risk minimization the patient should be enabled to cooperate by means of methods which are easy to handle in his everyday environment. First multicentric results of a new method of early detection of valve dysfunction are presented.