Associated Press 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.
Even when they recognized it, they had no reliable way of predicting which patients might recover. A study at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, found that when those patients are properly diagnosed and treated, they can recover fully within two weeks. The study was published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine. He said the condition is underdiagnosed. An echocardiogram and biopsy are used to diagnose the disease, usually caused by a viral or other infection or an immune disorder.