• Raúl Aguilar, Salomón Flores, Rosaura Sánchez, Rosa Bolaños, César Espinoza, Marjorie Flores, and Graciela Elías.
• Departamento de Medicina Interna, San Salvador, El Salvador. E-mail: detectiveprivado2@yahoo.ca.
• Medicina (B Aires). 2021 Jan 1; 81 (2): 154-158.

AbstractChagas disease is endemic in Latin America and remains a regional problem despite improvements in environmental health conditions that have helped to control its transmission. To know more about its prevalence in heart disease patients, we carried out a survey in our national (El Salvador) reference hospital. We reviewed the Chagas Lab's records 2013-2015 to find out how many of the patients admitted to the Hospital's Heart Unit were serologically positives for Trypanosoma cruzi infection and which the associated diagnoses were. A total of 1472 patients were tested along the 36-month study period. Out of 557 (37.8%) patients with positive serology for Chagas infection, 97 (17.4%) were eventually admitted to the Heart Unit. Among these 97 Chagas infected patients with heart disease, 40 (41.2%) met the criteria for permanent pacemaker placement, while only 13 of 191 (6.8%) patients with non-chagasic heart disease met these criteria. The frequency of heart atrioventricular block associated with Trypanosoma cruzi infection was higher than frequencies reported in South American studies.

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