Review
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2015. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Methodol. Sep 26, 2015; 5(3): 136-143
Published online Sep 26, 2015. doi: 10.5662/wjm.v5.i3.136
“How many times must a man look up before he can really see the sky?” Rheumatic cardiovascular disease in the era of multimodality imaging
Sophie I Mavrogeni, George Markousis-Mavrogenis, David Hautemann, Kees van Wijk, Hans J Reiber, Genovefa Kolovou
Sophie I Mavrogeni, George Markousis-Mavrogenis, Genovefa Kolovou, Onassis Cardiac Surgery Center, 17674 Athens, Greece
David Hautemann, Kees van Wijk, Hans J Reiber, University of Leiden, 2333 ZA Leiden, The Netherlands
Author contributions: All authors contributed to this manuscript.
Conflict-of-interest statement: There is no conflict of interest for any of the authors.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Sophie I Mavrogeni, MD, FESC, Onassis Cardiac Surgery Center, 50 Esperou Street, 175-61 P. Faliro, 17674 Athens, Greece. soma13@otenet.gr
Telephone: +30-210-9882797 Fax: +30-210-9882797
Received: April 21, 2015
Peer-review started: April 24, 2015
First decision: June 9, 2015
Revised: July 28, 2015
Accepted: August 20, 2015
Article in press: August 21, 2015
Published online: September 26, 2015
Processing time: 147 Days and 22.9 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: The oligo-asymptomatic cardiovascular presentation and the high cardiovascular mortality of rheumatic diseases (RD) necessitate a reliable and reproducible diagnostic approach to catch early cardiovascular involvement. Echocardiography, although being the cornerstone of cardiac evaluation, can not always exclude cardiac involvement and/or identify acuity and pathophysiology of cardiac lesions. Therefore, cardiovascular magnetic resonance is a necessary adjunct, complementary to echocardiography, especially in new onset heart failure and when there are conflicting data from clinical, electrocardiographic and echocardiographic evaluation of RD patients.