[A review of infectious endocarditis due to Candida].

OBJECTIVE: As fungal endocarditis is a serious disease, frequently requiring cardiac surgery, a review was made of the experience of our Departments in this pathology.

DESIGN: A retrospective analysis of clinical, echocardiographic and surgical data.

SETTING: Patients studied in a tertiary care Hospital with cardiac surgery available.

PATIENTS: Between 1984 and 1994 there were ten cases of candida endocarditis in nine patients, four male and five female, mean age--45 +/- 12 years (31-65).

INTERVENTIONS: The following parameters were analysed: clinical (predisposing factors, clinical evolution, complications, therapy and mortality), echocardiographic (presence of vegetations, abscesses, valvular regurgitations). Patients studied in other Centres and referred to our Department only for examination (echocardiograms) were excluded from this analysis.

RESULTS: Eight cases in seven patients were prosthetic valve endocarditis and two native valve endocarditis. No patient was drug addicted. Seven cases of prosthetic valve endocarditis developed less than one year after surgery and another had a gynecological fungal infection as the cause of the endocarditis. Four patients had had previous endocarditis. There were four embolic events and three developed heart failure. There were three perivalvular infections, six valvular regurgitations and only one case with huge vegetations on echocardiography. Nine patients were treated with amphotericin B, in five fluocytosin was added and in four ketoconazol, which was replaced by flukonazol in one patient. Therapy was continued for at least eight weeks. Six patients were operated during the acute stage and one died. One patient was operated on late after the infection. Three patients died during the active stage. In a follow up of 5.2 +/- 4.8 years (8 months to 8 years) there was one fatal candida endocarditis relapse, one fatal candida sepsis, one non cardiac death, one patient developed a periprosthetic leak and one had recurrent systemic embolization. Abscesses/pseudoaneurysms were found in five out of seven patients submitted to surgery.

CONCLUSION: Candida infective endocarditis has a bad prognosis, specially in those patients not operated early; it develops in patients with predisposing factors, which in our series were a previous infective endocarditis (four patients) and/or a prosthetic valve implantation less than one year before; it has important morbidity with multiple embolic events, perivalvular involvement, valvular regurgitation and heart failure.