Fig. 1

Survival proportions of EV patients grouped by their clinical course treatment. Long-term follow-up of patients with enteroviral cardiomyopathy revealed that cardiac EV persistence, due to the inability of a fraction of infected patients to eradicate the virus, is associated with a high mortality rate (red line). In contrast, patients capable of spontaneous virus elimination (as documented by a diagnostic EMB within approximately 6 months of initial presentation) or IFN-β therapy had a favourable long-term prognosis over 15 years (green line respectively blue line; Kaplan–Meier log rank statistics, p < 0.001). p values between the curves were indicates as *p < 0.05 **p < 0.01 ***p < 0.001 or ns for not significant