Introduction
Heart valve surgery is used for the repairing or replacement of valves of the heart that are diseased. The patients receive general anesthesia in this type of surgery whereby the surgeon makes a large surgical incision in the breastbone. The incision is meant to enable the surgeon to reach the aorta and the heart (Kato Paragraph 2). The relevance of stroke to the procedure of open-chest valve surgery is that it is one of the risks associated with cardiac surgery. Other risks include death, failure of the kidneys, cardiac arrest, irregular beats of the heart, and post-pericardiotomy syndrome (Kato ...
