Sarcoidosis is a systemic granulomatous disease that affects the myocardium. Although ventricular arrhythmias are well known manifestations of cardiac involvement, there is increasing evidence that a significant proportion of patients with cardiac sarcoidosis (CS) also have atrial arrhythmias, atrial fibrillation being the most frequent. The incidence and mechanism of atrial fibrillation in CS ...

A 56-year old woman complained of chest discomfort and dyspnea on exertion for one month. She had been diagnosed as mediastinal lymph node sarcoidosis through endobronchial ultrasonography guided transbronchial lymph node aspiration. Electrocardiogram at presentation demonstrated sequential first and second degree 2:1 atrioventricular block. Further imaging study with gadolinium enhanced cardia...

High-degree heart block is an uncommon manifestation of acute myocarditis in adults. The rate of heart block requiring a pacemaker in biopsy-proven acute lymphocytic myocarditis generally is low but has been reported in up to 8.3% of cases.1 Important exceptions include cardiac sarcoidosis and giant cell myocarditis (GCM), 2 uncommon and idiopathic disorders for which early immunosuppression ma...

A 48-year-old woman without known cardiovascular disease presented with progressive dyspnea. The ECG showed first-degree heart block. Plasma Troponin I and T were persistently elevated. Chest x-ray was normal. Echocardiography demonstrated asymmetrical left ventricular (LV) hypertrophy with septal predominance and moderately impaired LV systolic function. Coronary angiography demonstrated angio...

Patients with sarcoidosis suffer from a broad range of persistent symptoms, such as fatigue, dyspnoea and general weakness [1]. To date, specific nonpharmacological treatments to reduce the aforementioned symptoms are mostly lacking in the management of patients with sarcoidosis. Nevertheless, exercise training has shown to improve health status, exercise capacity, skeletal muscle function and ...

We report two cases of systemic sarcoidosis with atrial flutter as the clinical manifestation. In one patient, who had symptoms of shorter duration, the arrhythmia was no longer inducible after a course of glucocorticoid therapy. Electroanatomical mapping in the other case revealed patchy fibrosis of the left atrial myocardium and multiple macro-reentrant circuits. Sinus rhythm could be restore...

Pulmonary hypertension (PH) is a predictor of poor outcome in sarcoidosis. Little is known about the epidemiology of PH in sarcoidosis. The current authors reviewed the records of patients with sarcoidosis listed for lung transplantation in the USA between January 1995 and December 2002. PH was defined as a mean pulmonary artery pressure of >25 mmHg and severe PH as a mean pulmonary artery pres...

BACKGROUND The non-invasive diagnosis of cardiac sarcoidosis (CS) is difficult. Cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) has become a very valuable diagnostic tool in patients with suspected CS, but usually a combination of different tests is used. Oxygen uptake efficiency slope (OUES) is a parameter of cardiopulmonary exercise testing (CPET), which is used as an indicator for cardiovascular imp...

BACKGROUND The pathophysiology of sarcoidosis includes infiltrative inflammatory injury, as well as interstitial fibrosis formation. Delayed-enhancement (DE) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques have been shown to identify fibrotic tissue as areas of hyperenhancement. To test the hypothesis that DE-MRI can be used to identify myocardial fibrosis resulting from cardiac sarcoidosis, we ass...