Case Session 05: Systemic and Inflammatory Disease (2018)-Is something infiltrating the heart?

Video Transcription

Video Summary

The transcript reviews infiltrative cardiomyopathies and how CMR helps diagnose them. Infiltration means gradual, surreptitious tissue entry, seen in amyloid, sarcoid, hemochromatosis, Fabry disease, and rarer conditions like LAMP2 cardiomyopathy, Friedreich ataxia, and cardiac lymphoma. Patients are often referred for CMR because of increased wall thickness, arrhythmias, or heart failure, sometimes with helpful extracardiac clues. Key imaging tools are cine and late gadolinium enhancement, plus T1/T2 mapping and T2* for early or specific diagnoses. Important findings include sarcoid’s multifocal epicardial LGE, amyloid’s diffuse transmural pattern, Fabry’s low native T1, and iron overload’s low T2*.

Keywords

infiltrative cardiomyopathy

cardiac MRI

late gadolinium enhancement

T1 and T2 mapping

amyloidosis sarcoidosis Fabry disease