The patient: A 65-year-old woman in Austria
The symptoms: The patient had been experiencing shortness of breath during physical activity for several weeks when she went to a hospital for evaluation. She also had a history of passing unusually dark urine, which had been happening since childhood, and in her 40s, she’d had total hip and knee replacements on both sides due to arthritis.
What happened next: The woman’s doctors checked her heart function with an echocardiogram, which uses ultrasound to visualize blood flow through the heart’s valves and chambers. They also used cardiac catheterization, which involves guiding a long, thin tube through the blood vessels and into the heart to further examine its valves and look for blockages and narrowed arteries.
The diagnosis: The evaluations revealed that…