Paracoccidioidomycosis Diagnosed in Europe—A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Paracoccidioidomycosis is a systemic mycosis that is endemic in geographical regions of Central and South America. Cases that occur in nonendemic regions of the world are imported through migration and travel. Due to the limited number of cases in Europe, most physicians are not familiar with paracoccidioidomycosis and its close clinical and histopathological resemblance to other infectious and noninfectious disease. To increase awareness of this insidious mycosis, we conducted a systematic review to summarize the evidence on cases diagnosed and reported in Europe. We searched PubMed and Embase to identify cases of paracoccidioidomycosis diagnosed in European countries. In addition, we used Scopus for citation tracking and manually screened bibliographies of relevant articles. We conducted dual abstract and full-text screening of references yielded by our searches. To identify publications published prior to 1985, we used the previously published review by Ajello et al. Overall, we identified 83 cases of paracoccidioidomycosis diagnosed in 11 European countries, published in 68 articles. Age of patients ranged from 24 to 77 years; the majority were male. Time from leaving the endemic region and first occurrence of symptoms considerably varied. Our review illustrates the challenges of considering systemic mycosis in the differential diagnosis of people returning or immigrating to Europe from endemic areas. Travel history is important for diagnostic-workup, though it might be difficult to obtain due to possible long latency period of the disease.