[Nutritional status and heart valve surgery: response to surgical aggression]

Malnutrition is a condition of increased risk for surgical patients, yet incompletely understood. Its role in the prognosis of neoplastic, gastrointestinal and infective disease undergoing surgery is now better underlined; unfortunately the same attention is still lacking for the majority of cardiac diseases. Nowadays many methods are at hand for evaluation of nutritional status, and it is possible to restore the correct condition before surgery by various techniques of artificial nutrition. Here the authors consider the possibility of discovery and evaluation of various hidden conditions of malnutrition in patients suffering of valvular heart disease--depending or not from the cardiopathy itself--and their complex pathogenesis, to correct at the end such condition and offer the patients an optimal prognosis with therapeutical procedures.