Rheumatic fever: a model of a post-infectious autoimmune disease

Published on June 30, 2019   44 min

A selection of talks on Immunology

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0:00
I'm Jorge Kalil, I am a Professor and Head of Division of Clinical Immunology and Allergy at the School of Medicine University of Sao Paulo. I'm also Head of the Laboratory of Immunology at the Heart Institute, (InCor) at the same institution. What we're going to talk today is on "Rheumatic Fever". That is a model of post infectious autoimmune disease. Actually, it's perhaps one of the best if not the best model. How to study post infectious autoimmune disease in men.
0:34
So rheumatic fever occurs after an infection of the throat of Streptococcus pyogenes a very common infection in children. These people that are susceptible, and in a survey it seems that three to four percent of the people would be susceptible to the disease if not treated the sore throat. They will appear with polyarthritis. They can have the erythema marginatum, subcutaneous nodules Sydenham's chorea, but actually what they have is a carditis. And this carditis may evolve in the future eventually to rheumatic heart disease. That means that this carditis will bring to the lesions on the valves that would be permanent. This occurs in one third of the people that have rheumatic fever and have not being treated.
1:30
So rheumatic fever as I've mentioned, has an universal incidents to three to four percent of children between five to 16 years if the sore throats are not treated. The rheumatic heart disease occuring one third to 45 percent of all the patients that had rheumatic fever. There is an enormous number of cases in the world. We estimate that there are around 616 million cases of pharyngitis due to group A Streptococcus, and also have something like 16 million cases of rheumatic heart disease. These account for more than 200 thousand deaths per year.

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