Abstract
A 30-year-old woman was admitted to a hospital because of food poisoning, hypoproteinemia and acute renal failure. She was transferred to our hospital for treatment of acute heart failure complicated by pulmonary edema five days after admission. Her condition was rapidly improved by massive removal of body fluid by ultrafiltration and hemodialysis. She was diagnosed as having acute heart and renal failure.
She had no past history of heart disease, but under went an artificial abortion at the 16th week of pregnancy, two months before admission. Ultrasonic echocardiography on admission revealed a marked decrease in fractional shortening (14.0%) and ejection fraction (29.8%), but these parameters improved greatly to 32.6% and 61.6%, respectively, after 3 weeks.
These findings suggest that cardiac contractility was reduced, possibly due to myocarditis after artficial abortion, immediately followed by renal failure. It is possible that dehydration due to food poisoning and enterocolitis triggered the acute heart and renal failure in a hyponutritional state. We conclude that this case is “variant” peripartum cardiomyopathy complicated by acute renal failure.
