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S.V.

JAMA. 1970;213(8):1327.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

We are not unduly surprised when a routine checkup or screening test detects evidence of unsuspected chronic disease in an asymptomatic patient. A chronic disease may be expected not infrequently to remain silent. After all, detection of silent, latent, symptomless, chronic diseases is what routine checkups and screening tests are about. We are, however, less prepared to find evidence of a previous occurrence without the patient's awareness of what is generally regarded as an acute illness. How, for instance, could acute rheumatic fever have occurred unobserved in a patient who now presents with chronic rheumatic valvular disease?, Or, how did acute encephalitis pass unnoticed by a sufferer from postencephalitic parkinsonism?

Even more astonishingly, how was it possible for a patient to have had a myocardial infarction without knowing it? Our puzzlement notwithstanding, electrocardiographic patterns diagnostic of past myocardial infarctions of which the patient had no recollection have been reported by . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Footnotes
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