The role of HPV in malignant transformation of infected cells remains unclear. It is well known that the carcinogenesis must depend on promoters such as alcohol, tobacco, and metabolites of chronic inflammations. All patients with positive biopsies confirming HPV 16, 18, or 33 must receive special care to prevent the development of a carcinoma.

The clinical and postmortem findings in a 26 year old man with Kearns-Sayre syndrome are described. In the last years of his life he suffered from cardiac arrhythmias and a congestive cardiomyopathy, dying of cardiac pump failure. The heart was enlarged, especially the left ventricle which was fibrotic and excessively dilated. Histological and fine structural investigation revealed an excessive loss of myofibrils and an increase of enlarged mitochondria with lamellar and atypically tubular cristae in widespread heart muscle cells. Mitochondrial anomalies were also observed in some cells of the conductive system. This patient thus suffered not only from a mitochondrial myopathy with ragged red fibers but also from a fatal mitochondrial cardiomyopathy. The anomalies observed in the mitochondria of the conductive system cells suggest that the well-known conductive abnormalities in patients with Kearns-Sayre syndrome might be at least partly caused by disturbed function of these mitochondria.

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Despite extensive analysis of the ultrastructural changes in skeletal muscle fibers in chronic progressive external ophthalmoplegia (CPEO), similar changes in the heart muscle fibers of patients with cardiac involvement in CPEO, called Kearns-Sayre syndrome, have not been described in detail. We report the clinical long-term course in a patient with Kearns-Sayre syndrome in whom mitochondrial cardiomyopathy was suspected in vivo and was confirmed at autopsy as the underlying cause of severe dilative cardiomyopathy. Enlarged, abnormally structured, excessively augmented mitochondria and loss of myofibrils could be shown both in skeletal and heart muscle cells.