Acute rheumatic fever: Over-estimation or mis-conception?

摘要

Acute rheumatic fever (ARF) is a systemic immunologic response to group A streptococci (GAS). Traditional descriptions of classic features of ARF were established in pre-modern cardiology and rheumatology era when the armamentarium of laboratory tests was poor and detailed classifications of diverse conditions were not in place.Readers may remember the history of medicine when gout and ARF were the main alignments in rheumatism, and these entities encompassed the main body of literature on rheumatism during 1900s. This was true for the fate of pan arteritis nodosa (PAN). It was broken to more distinct clinical entities of systemic vasculitides in the late century [1,2]. Recent advances in modern medicine, reflected in more accurate and detailed classification of diseases, owed to discovery of highly sensitive and specific laboratory tests and imagings.