Myocarditis is a serious inflammatory heart disease, the diagnosis of which is often challenging. Although in some cases, the disease resolves spontaneously, it can lead to the development of acute heart failure and even death, or the formation of chronic myocardial remodeling resulting in dilated cardiomyopathy. The clinical signs of myocarditis are diverse and largely overlap with the symptoms of other cardiovascular diseases, complicating diagnosis and making the search for specific clinical markers of the disease a relevant task. The gold standard for diagnosing myocarditis is endomyocardial biopsy, which is an invasive procedure. This review aims to systematize current understanding of the role of cardiac mast cells in the mechanisms of inflammatory injury and myocardial remodeling in myocarditis of various etiologies. A special focus is on analyzing their mediator effects and the potential for pharmacological modulation of mast cell activity as an avenue for pathogenetically targeted therapy of inflammatory heart diseases.
Morozova et al. (Wed,) studied this question.