Sudden death in a pediatric heart transplant recipient with peripheral eosinophilia and eosinophilic myocardial infiltrates.

Eosinophilia has been rarely reported in pediatric heart transplant recipients and has been suggested to play a role in graft rejection. We report a case of a young female patient with peripheral blood eosinophilia who died suddenly 2 years following ABO-incompatible heart transplantation. She was found at autopsy to have myocardial infiltration of not only T-lymphocytes and macrophages expected in acute cellular rejection but also of eosinophils, B-lymphocytes, and plasma cells indicating myocarditis.