Presentation, Patterns of Myocardial Damage, and Clinical Course of Viral Myocarditis

Overview

Viral myocarditis has been recognized as a cause of congestive heart failure, however diagnosis and treatment represents a challenging process. Recently, there is an increasing frequency of different cardiotropic viruses in the clinical setting of myocarditis. The introduction of the new molecular techniques in analysing the etiologic agent of acute myocarditis has enhanced significantly the knowledge on the molecular epidemiology of these viruses. The etiology of patients admitted to our university hospital remains unclear. It is therefore important to identify the aetiology associated with myocardial infections. The purpose of the present study is to analyze the prevalence of a broad spectrum of cardiotropic viruses, including enteroviruses, adenoviruses and parvo B19 virus, in adults with suspected myocarditis with special reference to B19 virus due to its increasing prevalence nowadays. The results of this study will provide a very important information for the prevalent infectious viral agents in our university hospital which will guide treatment protocol.

Objectives 1. There are almost no data regarding the relative prevalence of viral pathogens associated with myocarditis and the demographic and clinical features related to these infections in Egypt. Therefore, our main interest is to determine the prevalence of the most common viruses in clinically relevant (i.e., hospitalization- requiring) patients with acute or chronic myocarditis, using highly sensitive molecular techniques as the diagnostic tool. 2. Our second aim is to determine the distribution of mono- and coinfections between these viral agents. 3. Finally, to correlate between the microbiological findings in this study and patient characteristics including age, sex, clinical features, regional distribution, and degree of urbanization (determined on the basis of the size of the city and the density of the population) of the patients.