Key result
Anemia may produce signs suggesting primary heart disease, including systolic and diastolic murmurs that can be generalized or localized to any valvular area.
Anemia in children can mimic primary heart disease by producing various cardiac murmurs and structural heart changes.
Clinicians should exclude anemia before attributing murmurs to primary heart disease in children; leaves open need for prospective validation.
In the later years of the nineteenth century, several writers on chlorosis described the occurrence of cardiac murmurs and enlargement of the heart and the postmortem observation of myocardial dilatation, hypertrophy and degeneration.1Since that time similar changes have been noted with many varieties of anemia, especially with the more chronic forms, such as the pernicious, the sickle cell and the erythroblastic type. Other symptoms and signs have been described, and the pathology of the cardiovascular system has been more carefully studied.2 (Footnote continued on next page) Anemia may produce signs which suggest primary heart disease. The murmurs are not necessarily of the so-called hemic type, in which the bruit is systolic in time and is confined to the base of the heart, but they may be heard in both systole and diastole and may be either generalized or localized to any of the valvular areas.3In
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C. G. Parsons (1939) conducted a review in Anemia. Anemia was evaluated. Anemia may produce signs suggesting primary heart disease, including systolic and diastolic murmurs that can be generalized or localized to any valvular area.
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