Why the study?
Infected cardiac myxoma is very infrequent and its diagnosis can be challenging due to non-specific symptoms and a lack of established management guidelines.
Pan-bacterial PCR of surgical specimens can successfully identify the causative pathogen in culture-negative infected cardiac myxoma.
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May enable pathogen ID in culture-negative infected myxomas; hypothesis-generating for molecular diagnostics, needs validation.
Although cardiac myxoma is one of the most common types of benign cardiac tumors, infected cardiac myxoma is very infrequent. The diagnosis of infected cardiac myxoma may be challenging because the presenting symptoms are non-specific and established management guidelines are lacking. This report describes a 39-year-old woman with a 5-month history of uncontrolled fever, chills, and myalgia who was diagnosed with myxoma and underwent mass excision. Although blood and urine cultures were negative for growing bacteria, a pathologic examination showed that the excised mass was a left atrial myxoma, with pan-bacterial polymerase chain reaction (PCR) of the surgical specimen revealing Haemophilus parainfluenzae at 99.87%, resulting in a diagnosis of infected cardiac myxoma. Laboratory tests, such as PCR, may supplement culture results in the diagnosis of infected cardiac myxoma.
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Kim et al. (2022) studied this question.
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