Cardiac abnormalities in the toxic oil syndrome, with comparative observations on the eosinophilia-myalgia syndrome

World Health Organization Cardiovascular Center, Galveston, Texas.

Early in the course of studies of the Spanish toxic oil syndrome it was recognized that vascular lesions were a major problem, most logically attributable to endothelial damage by the toxic oil. However, most clinical attention has been directed to the pulmonary complications and the evolution into a scleroderma-like illness later. In this study of 11 victims of the toxic oil syndrome careful postmortem studies of the coronary arteries and conduction system and neural structures of the heart demonstrated major injury to all those components of the heart. Obliterative fibrosis of the sinus node in four cases resembled findings in fatal scleroderma heart disease, and in eight the cardiac lesions resembled those of lupus erythematosus. The more impressive pathologic features involved the coronary arteries and neural structures, which were abnormal in every heart. The arterial disease included widespread focal fibromuscular dysplasia, but there was also an unusual myointimal proliferative degeneration of both small and large coronary arteries in five patients, four of whom were young women. In two hearts, portions of the inner wall of the sinus node artery had actually detached and embolized downstream. Coronary arteritis was rarely found. Inflammatory and noninflammatory degeneration of cardiac nerves was widespread. Fatty infiltration, fibrosis and degeneration were present in the coronary chemoreceptor. In most respects these cardiac abnormalities resemble those described in the eosinophilia-myalgia syndrome caused by an altered form of L-tryptophan. In both diseases there is good reason to anticipate more clinical cardiac difficulties than have so far been reported, and even more basis for future concern, especially relative to coronary disease and cardiac electrical instability.

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