An episode of the American television medical drama 'House' has helped German doctors identify the cause of a 55-year-old heart patient's mysterious symptoms.
In an article published in the journal Lancet, German doctors reported the case of a man who came to the Marburg University clinic suffering from severe heart failure.
Medical examinations at the clinic ruled out coronary artery disease, a common cause of heart failure. The man also had fever of unknown origin, had gone almost deaf and blind and had an underactive thyroid.
Doctors quickly noticed striking similarities between the man's symptoms and those displayed by a patient on an episode of the medical drama 'House' in which the fictional Dr Gregory House, played by British actor Hugh Laurie, identified cobalt poisoning as the cause.
The clinic regularly uses the television series to teach medical students. The lectures are led by Dr Juergen R Schaefer of the hospital's Centre for Undiagnosed Diseases.
"Searching for the cause combining these symptoms - and remembering an episode of the TV series House which we used for teaching medical students (series seven, episode 11) - we suspected cobalt intoxication as the most likely reason," the doctors wrote in the journal.
The patient's problems had started half a year after a hip replacement in May 2010, in which a broken ceramic-on-ceramic artificial hip was changed for a metal-on-plastic version.
The metal had been worn down by ceramic particles left behind, and was now spread into the bloodstream, poisoning the man to the point that he was in a serious condition by the time he arrived at Schaefer's clinic in May 2012.
Doctors identified the man's case as being similar to the one in an episode of 'House' called 'Family Practice', first shown in 2011.
The patient was then referred back to his orthopedic clinic and received a new ceramic hip implant. He stabilised and his heart function later recovered.
"I must admit 'House' was pretty helpful in this case. I did a seminar on cobalt intoxication and then half a year later came across this patient," Schaefer told 'The Independent'.
"I have used the show for five years as a teaching tool. When it started I used it just to get the students into the lecture hall. But it worked and we had 30 to 40 students in to listen to lectures on rare and unusual diseases," he said.
