Let’s start with an initial problem representation:
A 50 y/o F w/ a PMH of remote gastric bypass, anemia, MGUS & hereditary elliptocytosis p/w worsening fatigue, dyspnea on exertion, chronic chest discomfort and trouble sleeping at night
Looks like CHF
Also wondering if difficulty sleeping at night is orthopnea.
As well as if the difficulty doing tasks is due to SOB, extreme fatigue., or muscle weakness
Let's activate the dyspnea schema and connect some dots
Fatigue is a very non-specific symptom, considering a lot of things with her presentation, cardiac/resp/endocrine/MSK causes.
Let's take a look at this schema and see if we can find some overlap
What about possible ILD with how progressive the symptoms have been.
On exam, we should look for Raynaud's, dry hands (antisynthetase syndrome), JVP, edema, pallor, rashes, thyroid gland, proptosis, muscle strength.
She has a gastric bypass, I wonder if vitamin levels have been checked recently, worry about possible copper deficiency, thiamine, b12, Vit E etc.
Thiamine can cause a high output heart failure.
"Beriberi heart disease" Due to severe long-term (>3 mon) def of thiamine....
....it is more common in areas of dietary deficiency with high carbohydrate intake (such as the Far East).
In the developed world it is most frequently observed in chronic alcoholics due to poor dietary intake of thiamine, impaired thiamine absorption, metabolism and storage.
Beriberi heart disease is a cause of CHF w/ assoc elevated cardiac output, edema, fatigue, and general malaise (‘wet’ beriberi).
High output heart failure is possibly due to arteriolar &cutaneous vasodilatation leading to a🔽systemic vascular resistance. academic.oup.com/qjmed/article/…
Could also wonder about the transformation of MGUS or amyloidosis although the age would be on the younger side.
In the article cited above, the presence of pallor had a likelihood ratio of only 4.49 for predicting anemia.
W/ this likelihood ratio, if pretest probability of anemia is 50% and then finds pale conjunctivae on physical examination, the probability of anemia increases to 82%.
Now looking at her neuro and MSK exam
I wonder if she had any prev neuropathy from her MGUS that could explain the achilles réflex.
Proximal weakness makes me think thyroid, MGS, myositis. Also want to look at thiamine def, Vit E def, thyroid (would expect non-pitting edema)
Labs show nml WBC, anemia at 8.4, high plts 600, otherwise nml BMP. Kappa=14, Lambda=229
Kappa/Lamba ration of 0.06 (An abnormal FLC ratio (kappa-lambda ratio < 0.26 or > 1.65)
And an M spike in IgG
Could Waldenstrom macroglobulinemia cause the IgM spike?
Need a refresher on serum light chain ratio, "Serum free light chain ratio is an independent risk factor for progression in MGUS" ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
TTE: EF 35% w/ global hypokinesis, concentric LVH w/ significant diastolic dysfunction
Smells like amyloidosis. Would get urine studies and possible fat pad biopsy Or maybe a cardiac MRI
BM bx: 10-15% plasma cells, 10% Lambda secreting
And the final dx is....
Final dx: AL Amyloidosis
The term "amyloidosis" refers not to a single disease but to a collection of diseases in which a protein-based infiltrate deposits in tissues as beta-pleated sheets.
The proper nomenclature uses the letter "A" for amyloid, followed by the letter(s)..
referring to the main protein being deposited. For example, light-chain amyloidosis is "AL" ("A" for amyloid and "L" for light chain).
Hematogenous dissemination then can occur typically 4 to 10 weeks later, giving rise to secondary syphilis. <40% of pts w/ syphilis have primary syphilis diagnosed. These “Secondary” lesions last for several weeks before spontaneously resolving. Coined “early, latent infection”
What does late infection mean? When syphilitic lesions recur after 1 year from the initial eruption, or seropositivity is detected more than 1 year after the initial eruption, it is termed late latent syphilis.
Some optics neuritis pearls in a short #Medtweetorial 🧵…. We all know that optic neuritis is frequently associated with multiple sclerosis (MS). But optic nerve inflammation can exist from autoimmunity, infection, granulomatous disease, paraneoplastic disorders, & demyelination
Classical ON from MS is unilateral, moderate, painful color vision loss with an afferent pupillary defect & normal fundus examination.
In those with ON, 95% of patients showed unilateral vision loss & 92% had associated retroorbital pain that frequently worsened w/ eye movement.
If you have not listened to the @CuriousClinPod most recent podcast (Episode 10: Why does metronidazole treat both bacterial and parasitic infections?) then I suggest you tune in.
I'll summarize their show notes here in short #medtweetorial
First a question:
Was metronidazole first used as an antibiotic or as an antiparasitic?
If you guessed antiparasitic, then you would be correct!
It was developed in the 1950s to treat the parasite trichomonas & then was used in the 1960s to treat other parasitic infections, like giardia and amoebiasis.
A 31-year-old M born and raised in Brazil w/ no PMH presented with a 3 mon history of worsening DOE, orthopnea, 7kg weight loss, abdominal distention, dry cough, and syncope
An interesting fact from @3owllearning : Depending on the clinical problems, the studies of disease probability for differential diagnosis often show 10 - 25% of cases are unexplained, even after careful examination and testing.