Originally Posted by
67walkon
... I had a deformed aortic value. I was born with it and it worked fine through years of basketball, running and biking. They only found the valve because of all the tests they did trying to figure out why a generally healthy guy had afib...They completely fixed mine with an open heart surgery procedure known as a Maze procedure. They literally create scar tissue on your heart wall to prevent errant electrical signals from causing afib.
Good to hear about the Maze. My cardiologist has mentioned it, but I really don't have much trouble from the fib and it's not worth the risk of cracking me open unless there's some other reason to be in there.
FWIW, I also had a valve problem, with the mitral. Never gave me single symptom; they found it while they were looking around for whatever caused the fib. It's not serious enough to fix, either, unless my symptoms get much worse, but they suspect there's some relarionship among that, genetics (mom spent 20 years in fib, and my brother went into it at 44) and 15 years of pretty serious running.