Echographic diagnosis of cardiac involvement in systemic lupus erythematosus and systemic scleroderma.

The great frequency and severity of cardiac involvement in collagen diseases have proved to be an important diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic problem. In the last few years the value of echographic examination in the estimation of the pathologic cardiac changes in the course of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and of systemic scleroderma (SS) has considerably increased making the object of numerous studies. In this paper the results obtained in some of these studies are estimated comparatively.