[heart picture] can someone explain this?

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Those thick, pink, "fluffy" portions of the mitral valve (the middle right of the picture) are areas of myxomatous degeneration.
 
I remember a Kaplan question where it had a picture like that where it asked what the underlying pathology was. I thought it looked like mitral vegetations, but that wasn't an answer choice. I can't remember what I answered (I think I got it wrong)... the valve had vegetations, but they wanted us to say "mitral prolapse" because that's an underlying pathology that predisposes to conditions that cause vegetations.
 
You know it's MVP bc the chordae tendineae are long and thin (lower-center of image) and the valve leaflets are "ballooning" upward (entire top of image). Here's a different example of an MVP:

http://library.med.utah.edu/WebPath/CVHTML/CV033.html

Although infective endocarditis is a possibility, if they want you to identify vegetations, they'd likely make them reddish-tan/I]. Here's an example of IE:

http://library.med.utah.edu/WebPath/CVHTML/CV038.html


Ah yes, thanks. When I was looking at it I kept on saying to myself "man, these vegetations look so weird..." and I still picked infectious endocarditis afterwards lol.
 
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