Lyme disease is the most common tick-borne infection in the Northern hemisphere. Cardiac manifestations of Lyme disease typically include variable atrioventricular nodal block and rarely structural heart pathology. The incidence of Lyme carditis may be underestimated based on current reporting practices of confirmed cases. This case of a 59-year-old man with Lyme carditis demonstrates the uniqu...

background: to evaluate the frequency, clinical presentation and cardiac involvement of children with rf in the north-east of iran. methods: a case series analysis was conducted on 80 patients with acute rheumatic fever (arf), who were hospitalized   at ghaem hospital in mashad between 1994 and 2000, were studied. laboratory tests and results from echocardiographic examinations, and clinical fi...

Six patients with acute rheumatic carditis and intractable left ventricular failure, all in class 4 NYHA classification, underwent successful valve surgery combined with medical therapy. Two-dimensional echocardiography and Doppler studies showed all of them to have left ventricular dilatation, with good systolic function, together with severe mitral regurgitation; two patients also had severe ...

One hundred and eleven patients with rheumatic carditis of the first attack were treated with steroid hormone. In the cases, in which the steroid hormone therapy started within 2 weeks from the onset of the disease, all except one did not reveal a residual valvular heart disease after 2 years from the treatment. It was suggested that early diagnosis and the earliest start of steroid hormone the...

INTRODUCTION................................................................... 97 A BRIEF HISTORY .............. .................................................... 98 ETIOLOGY: EVIDENCE FOR THE GROUP A STREPTOCOCCAL ETIOLOGY OF RHEUMATIC FEVER ................................. ................................. 98 Immunological Evidence............................................................

We report that the spirochete B. burgdorferi induces progressive polyarthritis and carditis in mice with severe combined immunodeficiency syndrome (scid) but not in normal C.B-17 mice. The onset and severity of the disease were dependent on (a) the viability; (b) the infectivity; and (c) the dose of inoculated B. burgdorferi organisms. Infective spirochetes were isolated from both blood and joi...

Since the operation of mitral valvotomy was introduced, various attempts have been made to explain the high incidence of histologically active lesions in biopsies of the left atrial appendages removed at operation, in view of the low incidence of active lesions found at necropsy in clinically inactive cases of rheumatic heart disease. Several clinico-pathological studies have been made in biops...