A rare but deadly heart disease with symptoms that mimic the flu is curable if doctors figure out what it is in time and give the heart some help, researchers say. Fulminant myocarditis is a severe inflammation that weakens the heart. It affects fewer than one in a million patients, but often kills those people.
Doctors sometimes fail to recognize the disease.
And up to now, even when they recognized it, they had no reliable way of predicting which patients might recover. A study at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore found that when these patients are properly diagnosed and treated, they can recover fully within two weeks. We want to make physicians aware that although this condition is uncommon, it should be considered in patients with flu-like symptoms and fluid in the lungs,'' said Dr. Joshua M. Hare, associate director of the heart failure and cardiac transplant program at Hopkins. He said the condition is under-diagnosed. An echocardiogram and biopsy are used to diagnose the disease, usually caused by a viral or other infection or by an immune disorder.