Don’t Go Breaking My Heart: MCMV as a Model for HCMV-Associated Cardiovascular Diseases

Human Cytomegalovirus (HCMV) is a widespread pathogen that causes lifelong latent infection and is associated with the exacerbation of chronic inflammatory diseases in seropositive individuals. Of particular impact, HCMV infection is known to worsen many cardiovascular diseases including myocarditis, atherosclerosis, hypertension, and transplant vasculopathy. Due to its similarity to HCMV, murine CMV (MCMV) is an appropriate model to understand HCMV-induced pathogenesis in the heart and vasculature. MCMV shares similar sequence homology and recapitulates much of the HCMV pathogenesis, including HCMV-induced cardiovascular diseases. This review provides insight into HCMV-associated cardiovascular diseases and the murine model of MCMV infection, which has been used to study the viral pathogenesis and mechanisms contributing to cardiovascular diseases. Our new functional studies using echocardiography demonstrate tachycardia and hypertrophy in the mouse, similar to HCMV-induced myocarditis in humans. For the first time, we show long term heart dysfunction and that MCMV reactivates from latency in the heart, which raises the intriguing idea that HCMV latency and frequent virus reactivation perturbs long term cardiovascular function.