This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citation map  • Citing articles on HighWire  • Citing articles on Web of Science (7)  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in this journal  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

J. F. LEGIER, MD

Arch Intern Med. 1966;117(4):480-483.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

In 1941 Baggenstoss and Rosenberg¹ found a high incidence of cardiac lesions in their pathological analysis of 25 cases of rheumatoid arthritis, the majority of which were interpreted as being identical to rheumatic heart disease. It is only in later publications ^2-5 that rheumatoid heart disease emerged as a distinct entity, not attributable to previous rheumatic fever. Most lesions were nonspecific and consisted of valvular scarring, myocardial chronic inflammation, or healed pericarditis. They occurred in one third of autopsied rheumatoid patients. Rarely a pathognomonic rheumatoid lesion was found in the heart, made up of a central core of fibrinoid necrosis with peripheral palisading by histiocytes, identical to the subcutaneous rheumatoid nodule. Previous reports have all emphasized the presence of severe and longstanding arthritis. Therefore when heart disease becomes manifest without a background of typical rheumatoid polyarthritis, one does not seriously consider rheumatoid carditis in the differential diagnosis. In this . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
WASHINGTON, DC

From the Department of Pathology, Jefferson Memorial Hospital, Alexandria, Va, and the Department of Pathology, George Washington University School of Medicine, Washington, DC.

Footnotes
Received for publication Jan 15, 1965; accepted Dec 27.

Read before the Washington Society of Pathology, Oct 5, 1964.

Reprint requests to 525 Tenth St SE, Washington, DC 20003 (Dr. Legier).

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?