INTRODUCTION
Benign cardiac neoplasms are substantially rare and among these intracardiac cysts filled with blood are even more uncommon; indeed, they have not even been mentioned in a recent review of cardiac tumors reported by Tyebally et al.1. However, mainly owing to advancement in diagnostic techniques, with a widespread use of and accessibility to multimodality imaging, an increase in the diagnosis of cardiac or pericardial masses has been observed recently and is expected to further grow in the future1. Intracardiac blood cysts (BCs) are commonly found in newborns and infants being rare after the first year of life, they mainly involve the cardiac valves and generally disappear during growth2. In adults they may occasionally be diagnosed, are usually located on all cardiac valves and chambers, the mitral valve (MV) being the most frequently involved; despite absence of histological malignancy BCs of the heart valves have been reported to cause life-threatening complications with even severe sequelae.
There is still uncertainty on the origin of BCs and controversy on whether medical treatment with continuous clinical and echocardiographic patient follow-up should be preferred to immediate surgical removal. The present review, analysing the published cases, was undertaken with the aim of assessing the incidence, evaluating the clinical presentations and discussing the treatment of BCs involving the cardiac valves in adults.