To know what “rheumatic heart disease” is all about, we have to start with “rheumatic fever”. What is rheumatic fever? It is a non-purulent inflammatory disease caused by repeated infections with a bacterium called “group B streptococcus”. It often occurs between the ages of 5 and 15, and is most common in cold and changing seasons, in poor accommodation, in dark and humid environments, and in people with a high incidence of malnutrition. In other words, people with poor environment, weak resistance, and infected sites are prone to develop. Many patients present with tonsillitis and pharyngitis, with the obvious proverbial “sore throat”. This bacterium itself does not cause a “heart infection,” but if infected with this bacterium, the body’s immune system produces another response called a “systemic connective tissue inflammatory response,” and it is because of this “response This “reaction” leads to changes in various tissues and organs of the body, and the reaction in the joints produces “rheumatoid arthritis”, which causes wandering pain in large joints (the pain is not fixed in one joint), and I believe this is not unfamiliar to anyone. The effect on the brain causes “chorea”, which is manifested in the skin and can appear as skin nodules. The reaction in the heart is called rheumatic heart disease, which includes two types of lesions, rheumatic myocarditis and rheumatic valve disease, and what we usually call rheumatic heart disease is simply understood as rheumatic valve disease. In fact, rheumatic fever itself also has an effect on the heart muscle, but the heart changes caused by valve disease are just more obvious. This inflammatory response repeatedly leads to repeated inflammatory stimulation of the heart’s valves, resulting in leaflet thickening, adhesions, calcification, tendon thickening, and fusion, which affects the heart’s pumping function. This is rheumatic heart disease, or “rheumatic heart disease” for short.