Endocarditis

Infective endocarditis is an infection of the endocardial surface of the heart, most often a valve. It is uncommon, it is frequently missed early, and untreated it is close to uniformly fatal — which is why a patient with unexplained fever and a reason to have a susceptible heart deserves active suspicion rather than reassurance. What makes it distinctive is that it is an endovascular infection. The organism is not walled off in a tissue abscess; it is sitting on a surface washed by every liter of blood the heart moves. That single fact explains almost everything else about the disease: the persistent bacteremia, the need for prolonged intravenous therapy, the fever that does not settle, and the sudden catastrophic complications when a fragment breaks free. This lesson is written for United States psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioner practice. Endocarditis reaches psychiatric settings more often than most clinicians expect — through injection drug use, and through patients whose physical illness is misread as psychiatric decompensation. The specialty contribution here is recognizing the disease in people whose symptoms are routinely attributed to...