Aortic valve regurgitation

First of all, in understanding aortic valve regurgitation, something needs to be known of the aortic valve itself, its uses, its purpose, how it functions.
This may be time, in fact, to say something about heart education in general. Most people understand that a healthy diet and plenty of exercise will help you to have a strong, sturdy heart. What's not thought about as often is education about the various diseases and maladies that can assail the heart and cause it to break down earlier than it would have otherwise. It is possible, after all, to feel perfectly fine, to feel healthy and energetic, and inwardly be suffering from non-visible, even non-feelable heart disorders. Education, then, is the third step in keeping your heart vibrant and strong.

The aortic valve's function is fairly simple, but very, very important. The aortic valve is sort of like the main door to your heart. It's attached to the heart's main pump. The heart pumps blood from its main pump through the doorway of the aortic valve and into the large artery that leaves your heart and joins up with all your other arteries, thus filling your body with healthy rich red blood.
When the aortic valve is functioning properly, it acts just like a door acts, opening to let the pumped blood flow out and into the arteries, and closing to keep the blood from flowing back in.
The reason you don't want blood flowing back in is that your heart is just like any other machine. Your heart operates to certain rules and regulations. Things need to be just so for your heart to operate like it's supposed to. If your heart's main pump tries to pump blood out, and some of that blood creeps back in, suddenly it's having to deal with a larger volume of blood than it's used to. It's having to pump more often, and pump more strongly, it's having to change the rhythm that it's used to, indeed, the rhythm that YOU are used to.
Aortic valve regurgitation, then, means that your aortic valve is opening just fine, but having problems when it comes to closing. Aortic valve regurgitation means that blood is creeping back in through the partially opened aortic valve, it's creeping back into the main pump. The main pump, confronted with a new problem, begins to act strangely, to act out of the usual.
The problem is, aortic valve regurgitation can be going on for years and years and you won't know it because the heart, in order to deal with the excess blood, enlarges, so that at first you're not aware that there's a problem. The reason that you want to catch aortic valve regurgitation fairly early on is that overworking your heart can destroy the aortic valve altogether, and cause irreparable damage to the muscles of your heart. A heart that's too damaged can lead to a heart that stops altogether.
Some of the symptoms of aortic valve regurgitation that do develop are fatigue: you're more tired than usual, more listless, less likely to want to go for a walk or get out of bed. Youe heart may begin beating abnormally, it may feel like it's skipping beats in fact or feel strangely fluttery. With aortic valve regurgitation you might feel chest pain, like a stabbing deep in your heart; you may even faint.
It is important to schedule regular heart check ups with your doctor so that this type of problem can be caught fairly early on. Your doctor may hear a heart murmur (an irregular sound in the heart, which is the heart dealing with the excess blood). Then he or she can take tests to see how extensive the damage is to your heart, how much excess blood you're having to deal with, and so on. There are machines that take photographs of your heart valves to do this. Then your doctor can begin to work on treatments, including medication for milder cases and changes of lifestyle such as you not participating as heavily in sports. In severer cases, surgery may be required to repair your aortic valve, and in some cases the valve will need to be replaced altogether.