Acute myocarditis may not only develop into congestive heart failure, but it has also been strongly implicated in the pathogenesis of dilated cardiomyopathy. The mechanism of myocardial cell injury involved in acute myocarditis is of great clinical significance, but remained to be clarified for a long period. Because patients with acute myocarditis often show significantly increased virus titer...

STUDY OBJECTIVE Data on the prevalence of myocarditis in children are limited. Autopsy studies have shown that myocarditis is often undiagnosed. We attempted to investigate the clinical features of asymptomatic myocarditis in four schoolchildren detected during a mass ECG screening in schoolchildren. DESIGN AND SETTING To evaluate asymptomatic myocarditis, we clinically examined 12 schoolchil...

This study was designed to investigate whether cocaine can exacerbate viral myocarditis and increase its incidence. Recent clinical evidence suggests that cocaine abuse increases the incidence of myocarditis. However, it has not been directly demonstrated that cocaine exposure enhances murine myocarditis. BALB/c mice were divided into eight groups: saline control, encephalomyocarditis virus (EM...

T he study by Davidoff and colleagues in this issue of Circulation' is helpful because it establishes clinically useful distinctions between two forms of myocarditis. In thinking about etiologies of myocarditis, I find it helpful to consider six categories. The first, viral myocarditis, is caused by ongoing myocardial infection, such as by coxsackievirus B3 or mumps virus. All other infectious ...

Third-degree atrioventricular block (AVB) and primary inflammatory myocarditis are uncommon findings in horses. The horse of this report presented for collapse at rest and was found to have multiple cardiac arrhythmias, most notably 3rd-degree AVB. The horse was subsequently diagnosed with eosinophilic myocarditis on necropsy, a rare form of myocarditis not previously reported in horses. Despit...

Myocarditis and dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) are often caused by viral infections and occur more frequently in men than in women, but the reasons for the sex difference remain unclear. The aim of this study was to assess whether gene changes in the heart during coxsackievirus B3 (CVB3) myocarditis in male and female BALB/c mice predicted worse DCM in males. Although myocarditis (P = 4.2 × 10(-5...

We tested four isolates of Trypanosoma cruzi to assess parasite virulence and ability to cause myocarditis, cardiac sympathetic denervation, and histopathologic alterations in organs of the digestive system. The susceptibility of rats depends on the population of T. cruzi, with the ABC strain and the CL-Brener clone killing all animals, regardless of the parasitemic pattern. All tested T. cruzi...

Giant cell myocarditis is a serious and frequently fatal inflammatory heart disease of which the etiology remains unknown. In the present study, we investigated the origin of multinucleated giant cells in myocarditis with the use of an experimental model. We also examined the factors relating to the formation of giant cells in myocarditis. Severe myocarditis characterized by the appearance of m...

Inflammatory changes in the myocardium have been visually observed as alterations on echocardiograms. The goal of this study was to determine how these myocardial changes affect the texture of echocardiographic images, and how these could be described through quantitative texture analysis. The results of 142 endomyocardial biopsies were compared with those of texture analysis in echocardiograms...

Background Myocarditis is an inflammatory cardiac disease with a wide range of symptoms and various etiologies. The diagnostic workup and the treatment of myocarditis remain highly controversial. Therefore, there is a high demand for reliable animal models. Experimental autoimmune myocarditis (EAM) represents a model of human myocarditis and heart failure. In this study we investigated the hist...