Why the study?
Key steps of the viral life cycle, clinical characteristics, and global burden of parechoviruses are not well characterized yet, particularly for nonhuman parechoviruses.
This review highlights the biology, evolution, and clinical impact of parechoviruses, emphasizing the need for better characterization of their role in human and animal diseases, including myocarditis.
Clinicians may consider parechoviruses in unexplained infant encephalitis; research leaves open their role in human myocarditis.
Parechoviruses are non-enveloped, positive-sense, single-stranded RNA viruses that have been isolated from multiple vertebrate species. Infection with these etiologic agents of typically mild childhood respiratory and gastrointestinal illness in humans is nearly universal, and a subset of infected neonates and infants develop severe neurologic diseases. Rodent parechoviruses cause myocarditis, encephalitis, and perinatal death in multiple rodent species. The key steps of the viral life cycle, clinical characteristics, and global burden of these viruses are not well characterized yet, particularly for nonhuman parechoviruses. Here, we review the history of human and nonhuman parechovirus isolation, global seroprevalence and distribution, viral biology, and evolution, considering these factors might contribute to host specificity, virulence, tissue tropism, pathogenesis, host immunity, and population dynamics.
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Alam et al. (2025) studied this question.
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