Dear Editors: Dengue is an important mosquito-borne viral disease which is prevalent in many tropical countries. The cardiac complications in dengue are not common. Here, the details of dengue cardiac infection are briefly reviewed. Myocarditis is the most common documented cardiac pathology in dengue, however, only a few cases are reported in the world literature. Wiwanitkit proposed a probabl...

Myocarditis in children and adolescents is an inflammatory myocardial disease with a heterogeneous presentation ranging from oligosymptomatic, no impaired ejection fraction to catastrophic clinical cardiogenic shock (fulminant myocarditis) or sudden death. Thus, this condition remains major challenge the diagnostic therapeutic points of view. Despite different etiologies listed, most frequent f...

BACKGROUND This study evaluated the performance of novel quantitative T1 and T2 mapping cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) techniques to identify active myocarditis in patients with recent-onset heart failure. METHODS AND RESULTS Thirty-one consecutive patients with recent-onset heart failure, reduced left ventricular function and clinically suspected myocarditis underwent endomyocardial...

Myocarditis is an inflammation of the myocardium. Clinical presentation ranges from non-specific systematic symptoms to fulminant collapse and sudden death. Sudden death occurs at rates of 8.6-12% and cardiomyopathy at 9%. In active myocarditis, there is inflammatory cellular infiltrate with myocardial necrosis. The disease is distinguished by clinical presentation in fulminant and non-fulminan...

The purpose of this study was to describe and compare the cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) characteristics of myocarditis caused by high dose interleukin-2 (7 patients) with community-acquired myocarditis (14 patients). A total of 21 patients with suspected myocarditis and elevated cardiac enzymes underwent cine CMR followed by delayed enhancement. The mean ejection fraction was mildly decrease...

The prevalence of myocardial involvement in influenza infection ranges from 0% to 11% depending on the diagnostic criteria used to define myocarditis. Whether such an association holds for the novel influenza A strain, pandemic-2009-H1N1, remains unknown. The clinical presentation of myocarditis varies and often mimics myocardial infarction. Although history, physical examination, laboratory da...

Background. Giant cell myocarditis has rarely been diagnosed premortem, and little is known about its natural history. In addition, no comparative studies with lymphocytic myocarditis exist. Methods and Results. The clinical features, serial change in left ventricular fraction (LVEF), and outcomes of all patients with histologically verified myocarditis were retrospectively evaluated. Ten patie...

BACKGROUND Activation of the cholinergic anti-inflammatory pathway, which relies on the α7nAchR (alpha 7 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor), has been shown to decrease proinflammatory cytokines. This relieves inflammatory responses and improves the prognosis of patients with experimental sepsis, endotoxemia, ischemia/reperfusion injury, hemorrhagic shock, pancreatitis, arthritis and other inflam...

RATIONALE In recent work, we have demonstrated a crucial role of mast cells in the development of viral myocarditis. Viral infection could lead to increased synthesis of free immunoglobulin light chains (FLC) and our earlier work showed that FLC can trigger mast cell activation. OBJECTIVE We studied the possible involvement of FLC in the pathogenesis of viral myocarditis, and therapeutic effe...

Determining the etiology of cardiac dysfunction in patients with heart failure influences management and prognosis.1 Myocarditis, diagnosed by the current histopathological Dallas criteria, accounts for 10% of patients with new-onset cardiac dysfunction submitted to endomyocardial biopsy.1,2 Despite complete evaluation including history, physical examination, blood work, echocardiography, coron...