You are here

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Editorial
Sex differences in cardiac sarcoidosis
  1. Jan M Griffin
  1. Department of Medicine, Division of Cardiology, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, South Carolina, USA
  1. Correspondence to Dr Jan M Griffin, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, South Carolina 29403, USA; griffjan{at}musc.edu

http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/heartjnl-2023-322610

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    Sarcoidosis, first described in 1869 by Dr James Hutchinson, is a multisystem inflammatory granulomatous disease of unknown aetiology, most commonly affecting the lungs, with approximately 5% of patients having clinically significant cardiac involvement. Evidence suggests a higher prevalence of cardiac sarcoidosis (CS) in women, African–Americans and the Japanese population (almost 60%).1 Furthermore, cardiac involvement is responsible for 25% of deaths in patients with sarcoidosis in the USA and up to 85% in Japan. Despite the recognition of CS by Bernstein2 over 90 years ago, data are lacking due to the rarity of the disease and lack of prospective studies. As such, small to moderate sized patient registries have been used to describe the epidemiology, treatment and outcomes in an effort to shed light on this rare disease.

    Iso and colleagues describe sex differences in CS in a Japanese population using the Illustration of the Management and Prognosis of Japanese Patients with CS registry, which is a multicentre retrospective registry that investigated the clinical features and outcomes of a Japanese population with CS between 2001 and 2017.3 The study endpoint was potentially fatal ventricular arrhythmic events (pFVAEs). Almost two-thirds of the subjects diagnosed with CS were female with a peak age at diagnosis of 60–64 years of age in both sexes; only 10% of men were <40 years at diagnosis and <2% of women. Over the 3-year follow-up period, 16% of women and 25% of men had pFVAE, of which the majority …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Twitter @JanMGriffin

    • Contributors This is an invited editorial, JG performed the literature search, wrote the article and accepts full responsibility for the finished article.

    • Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

    • Supplemental material This content has been supplied by the author(s). It has not been vetted by BMJ Publishing Group Limited (BMJ) and may not have been peer-reviewed. Any opinions or recommendations discussed are solely those of the author(s) and are not endorsed by BMJ. BMJ disclaims all liability and responsibility arising from any reliance placed on the content. Where the content includes any translated material, BMJ does not warrant the accuracy and reliability of the translations (including but not limited to local regulations, clinical guidelines, terminology, drug names and drug dosages), and is not responsible for any error and/or omissions arising from translation and adaptation or otherwise.

    Linked Articles