Undiagnosed Whipple's disease with a lethal outcome

Whipples disease is a rare multisystem disease caused by rod-shaped bacteria Tropheryma whipplei. Although it affects all age groups, the typical patient is a middle-aged white man. The clinical signs are very heterogeneous and depend on the stage of the disease. The most common is abdominal manifestation characterized by weight loss, disability, chronic diarrhea and abdominal pain. Untreated Whipples disease is almost always fatal. We describe probably the first published case of undiagnosed Whipples disease with a lethal outcome in Slovakia, occuring in a 33-year old white man with involvement of the gastrointestinal tract, abdominal lymphatic nodes and brain, who died of bronchopneumonia.