Abstract
Acute rheumatic fever continues to be an important health problem, especially in countries that are socioeconomically underdeveloped. Carditis, which develops in approximately half of the patients, is responsible for both early-stage mortality as well as late-stage surgical treatment due to heart valve insufficiency or stenosis. The most frequent and severe valve involvement is with the mitral valve, while the aortic valve has the second highest incidence of involvement. Pulmonary and tricuspid valves are rarely involved. The literature cites a few adult cases in which all four valves are affected by rheumatic carditis; however, to the best of our knowledge, there have been no acute-stage rheumatic carditis pediatric cases reported. This article presents a 13-year-old male patient of Syrian origin who escaped to Turkey from the war in his country, and who was in the acute stage of rheumatic carditis in which all four valves were involved.
Keywords: acute rheumatic fever, childhood, four valves, quadrivalvular
Copyright and license
Copyright © 2017 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format, provided the original work is properly cited.