What happens when you have a faulty heart valve and blood back washes between the chambers?

Answer 1

Back-flow of blood through heart valves is known as a heart murmur; for example, mitral regurgitation refers to a faulty mitral heart valve that allows blood to push back through the partly open valve.

Many people have mild heart murmurs. Most are known as a "functional murmur" and cause no major symptoms, nor cause for concern. These persons must take antibiotics before teeth cleaning or extraction because of the risk of further heart damage IF a blood infection would occur as a result of the dental procedure. Otherwise, most patients with a mitral valve murmur are healthy and it has little effect on activities or health.

Heart murmurs are "staged", meaning they are assigned a degree of severity. A doctor ausculates (listens) to the heart for sounds characteristic of murmur. A normal heart with no murmur causes a "lub- dub" sound in 2 distinct beats. But in a heart murmur, the sound is more 'slurred', as a lub---dubbb, with a longer version of the second sound. The characteristic of heart murmur is a distinct "swoosh" in the heart beat.

Since blood "back washes" in a murmur, it is like making the heart work doubly hard: the first effort is when the heart pushes the blood through the valve the first time, then the second effort occurs when the heart must take that remaning blood (combined always with new blood being dumped into the chamber) and push it through the same valve a second time.

A normal valve closes completely, similar to how a rubber band snaps back to a smaller size when stretched and let go, except a heart valve should close completely between heart beats. If the heart valve is very flabby (such as in an obese person), or if the person has a severe murmur or a second murmur, exercise and exertion can cause work that the heart cannot tolerate since demands on the heart increase during activity. Typically the person may feel extra tired, feel dizzy, or even faint from a severe heart murmur.