Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Causes
By Mayo Clinic staffDressler's syndrome is thought to develop from an overactive immune system response to heart tissue damage, such as from a heart attack or heart surgery. Your body reacts to the injured tissue as it would to any injury, by sending immune cells and proteins called antibodies to clean up and repair the affected area. But this response appears to cause excessive inflammation in the sac enveloping the heart (pericardium), and the symptoms of Dressler's syndrome develop.
Some older studies estimated that Dressler's syndrome developed in about 3 percent to 4 percent of people who'd had a heart attack. But because of improvements in the treatment of heart attack — which reduce the amount of damage done to heart tissue — the occurrence of Dressler's syndrome today is less common.
