Clinical and Prognostic Significance of Idiopathic Left Bundle-Branch Block in Young Adults.

Aims: LBBB is rare in healthy young adults, and its long-term prognosis is uncertain.

Methods: 56 subjects (aged <50 years), in whom an LBBB was discovered by chance in the absence of clinical and echocardiographic evidence of heart disease, were collected in a multicenter registry.

Results: 69% were males.

Physical fitness of primary school children in relation to overweight prevalence and physical activity habits.

A cross-sectional study was carried out to analyse, through a limited number of fitness tests, the main conditioning and coordinative abilities in children aged 8-9 years, and their relationship with gender, anthropometric variables and physical activity habits. The height and weight of 256 boys and 241 girls were measured and information about physical activity habits was collected using a self-administered questionnaire. Physical performance was assessed by means of a few standardised tests: 'sit & reach', medicine-ball forward throw, standing long jump, 20 m running speed, and forward roll test.

[Hospital mortality at a cardiosurgical unit in Torino: international comparisons and time trend].

Objective: To compare hospital mortality in a cardiac surgery unit with external data and to assess changes in time (patients undergoing surgery in two different periods).

Materials And Methods: Data on risk factors for hospital mortality were collected from clinical records (retrospectively for the first period and prospectively for the second) for all patients undergoing open heart surgery at the Heart Surgery Unit of the University of Turin (Italy) during 1991 and 1995 (n = 1794) and 1999 (n = 892). Comparisons of in-hospital mortality, expressed as Standardized Mortality Ratios (SMR), were adjusted for risk factors defined according to EuroSCORE (European System for Cardiac Operative Risk Evaluation).

Long-term outcome after valve replacement with the omnicarbon prosthesis.

Background And Aim Of The Study: The study aim was to determine whether long-term prognosis was affected by valve replacement with a tilting-disc prosthesis.

Methods: Surgical data were recorded prospectively for all (n = 153) valve replacement cases with the Omnicarbon prosthesis during the period February 1985 to January 1986. A rheumatic valvular pathology was present in 105 patients (68.