Cleveland Clinic On Pericarditis: Admits High-T Fighting-Age Men Most Affected, Can Barely Suppress Excitement

Pericardial Disease and How Your Doctor Cares for You

December 28, 2021

My name is Dr. Allen Klein. I'm the Director of the Center for the Diagnosis and Treatment of Pericardial Diseases at the Cleveland Clinic. And it's my great pleasure talking about pericarditis.

I think this field is very exciting. At this moment, there's a explosion of publications on pericarditis. In particular, you have advanced imaging that helps diagnose pericarditis and now you have therapeutics such as the IL-1 blockers, rilonacept in the treatment. Patients are coming here for these new imaging and treatments.

… The outlook is quite good for recurrent pericarditis if you catch it early. The biggest mistake that we see here is that the acute episode is not recognized properly and when recognized it's undertreated and patients come here with multiple recurrent pericarditis episodes.

Now, one thing that I should mention is that the MRI is very, very useful because it can prognosticate how bad the severity is and how many months to years you may need to be put on therapy.

… Another important point is that now the mRNA vaccines such as with Pfizer and Moderna, can rarely cause myocarditis or mild pericarditis. The phenotype or a certain person that gets this would be a young 20-year old male that has a lot of testosterone and testosterone may play some role, and they can get a myocarditis, pericarditis. Usually, this is very self-limited, very self-limited and goes away over time. And the treatment is very, very similar to treating recurrent pericarditis from other causes.

So in summary, I think there's a lot of excitement in this field. Pericarditis, as I mentioned, we have the advanced imaging and new therapeutics in treating this problematic disease. Thank you very much.

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