Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Eosinophilic myocarditis
Summary
Eosinophilic myocarditis is inflammation in the heart muscle that is caused by the infiltration and destructive activity of a type of white blood cell, the eosinophil. Typically, the disorder is associated with hypereosinophilia, i.e. an eosinophil blood cell count greater than 1,500 per microliter (normal 100 to 400 per microliter). It is distinguished from non-eosinophilic myocarditis, which is heart inflammation caused by other types of white blood cells, i.e. lymphocytes and monocytes, as well as the respective descendants of these cells, NK cells and macrophages. This distinction is important because the eosinophil-based disorder is due to a particular set of underlying diseases and its preferred treatments differ from those for non-eosinophilic myocarditis.
Eosinophilic myocarditis is often viewed as a disorder that has three progressive stages. The first stage of eosinophilic myocarditis involves acute inflammation and cardiac cell necrosis (i.e. areas of dead cells); it is dominated by symptoms characterized as the acute coronary syndrome such as angina, heart attack and/or congestive heart failure. The second stage is a thrombotic stage wherein the endocardium (i.e. interior wall) of the diseased heart forms blood clots which break off, travel in, and block blood through systemic or pulmonary arteries; this stage may dominate the initial presentation in some individuals. The third stage is a fibrotic stage wherein scarring replaces damaged heart muscle tissue to cause a clinical presentation dominated by a poorly contracting heart and cardiac valve disease. Perhaps less commonly, eosinophilic myocarditis, eosinophilic thrombotic myocarditis, and eosinophilic fibrotic myocarditis are viewed as three separate but sequentially linked disorders in a spectrum of disorders termed eosinophilic cardiac diseases. The focus here is on eosinophilic myocarditis as a distinct disorder separate from its thrombotic and fibrotic sequelae.
Eosinophilic myocarditis is a rare disorder.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.