Acute benign idiopathic pericarditis; a report of twenty cases.

Pericarditis has usually been thought to be synonymous with serious underlying disease. In the past decade clinicians have become increasingly aware of a relatively benign inflammatory disease involving the pericardium without any known specific etiological agent. In a two-year span on a cardiac service in the Army, 20 cases of so-called idiopathic benign pericarditis were encountered, and a detailed analysis of these cases will be presented along with the differential diagnosis and prognosis. Since the introduction of antibiotic therapy, it has been our belief that the disease makes up a higher percentage of pericarditis than was formerly reported. Reeves, 1 in 1953, reported that acute benign pericarditis constituted 10.4% of 108 cases of pericarditis; however, many of these occurred in the preantibiotic era. Part of this discrepancy may occur from the relative age and sex difference between Army and civilian hospitals. In 1854, Hodges 2 initially described a case of