Euthermic Endocarditis

Background

Most patients with infective endocarditis (IE) manifest fever. Comparison of endocarditis patients with and without fever, and whether the lack of fever in IE is a marker for poorer outcomes, such as demonstrated in other severe infectious diseases, have not been defined.

Methods and Results

Cases from the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, Division of Infectious Diseases IE registry, a single-center database that contains all cases of IE treated at our center. Diagnosis date between 1970 and 2006, which met the modified Duke criteria for definite endocarditis, without fever was included. There were 240 euthermic endocarditis cases included in this analysis, with 282 febrile controls selected by frequency matching on gender and decade of diagnosis. Euthermic patients had a median age of 63.6 years (±16.1) as compared to 59.0 years (±16.4) in the febrile control group (p=0.001). Median (IQR) symptom duration prior to diagnosis was 4.0 (1.0, 12.0) weeks in the euthermic group compared to 3.0 (1.0, 8.0) weeks in the febrile controls (p= 0.006). From unadjusted analyses, survival rates were 87% in euthermic cases versus 83% in febrile controls across 28-day follow-up (p=0.164), and 72% in euthermic group cases versus 69% in febrile controls across 1-year follow-up (p=0.345). Also unadjusted, the 1-year cumulative incidence rate of valve surgery was higher in euthermic cases versus febrile controls (50% vs. 39%, p= 0.004).

Conclusions

Patients with euthermic endocarditis are older, and lack of fever was associated with longer symptom duration and delayed diagnosis prior to IE diagnosis. Despite a higher unadjusted rate of valve surgery in euthermic patients, the result was not significant when adjusting for baseline confounders. Differences in survival rates at both 28-days and 365-days were not statistically significant between the two groups.