Boeck's Sarcoid With Complete Heart Block Mimicking Carotid Sinus Syncope

Sarcoidosis is a disease with myriad facets concerning many of which relatively little is known. This is due chiefly to the relative benignity of the disease and consequent lack of autopsy material. Only 66 autopsied cases have been recorded in the literature.¹Of these, only 15 cases presented direct cardiac involvement. Most of the cases were asymptomatic insofar as cardiac manifestations were concerned. Bernstein and others²in 1929 published the first report in the English literature of an autopsied case with cardiac involvement, their patient being a 52-year-old white man with no cardiac symptoms and nodules in the epicardium, as well as invasion of the superficial myocardial fibers. In the English literature, only 12 other authenticated autopsied cases are described.³One of Longcope and Fisher's cases,3ia 42-year-old Negro man with a marked cor pulmonale, showed sarcoid lesions throughout the myocardium and pericardium plus a large