Courtesy American College of Physicians
and World Science staff

A minor ep­i­dem­ic of strep­to­coc­cal in­fec­tion may have killed Wolf­gang Amadeus Mo­zart, the tow­er­ing com­pos­er who died mys­te­ri­ously in 1791, re­search­ers say.

Specula­t­ion on causes of Mo­zart’s rath­er sud­den death at age 35 have ranged from poi­son­ing to rheu­mat­ic fe­ver. But there has been no con­sen­sus on what really hap­pened, al­though most ex­perts call the mur­der sce­nar­i­o un­like­ly.

Mozart as por­trayed in a con­tem­por­ary etch­ing by K. Dos­tal.
The Aus­tri­an com­pos­er suc­cumbed af­ter a short ill­ness, for which oth­er re­cent di­ag­noses have in­clud­ed kid­ney fail­ure, He­noch-Schon­lein pur­pu­ra, and le­thal trich­i­no­sis.

Ac­cord­ing to wit­nesses, Mo­zart’s body be­came badly swol­len in his fi­nal days. He died on Dec. 5, 1791, iron­ic­ally in the midst of writ­ing of his famed Req­ui­em or fu­ner­al mass, which had been anon­y­mously com­mis­sioned. Up­on sens­ing his end was near, wit­ness ac­counts say, Mo­zart took to bit­terly re­mark­ing that the piece must have been meant for him­self.

The new study pro­pos­ing an out­break of strep­to­coc­cus bac­te­ria as the cause of Mo­zart’s de­mise ap­pears in the Aug. 17 is­sue of the re­search jour­nal An­nals of In­ter­nal Med­i­cine.

Richard Zeger of the Aca­de­mic Med­ical Cen­ter in Am­ster­dam and col­leagues ex­am­ined the of­fi­cial daily reg­is­ter of deaths in Mo­zart’s Vi­en­na for the pe­ri­od be­tween No­vem­ber and De­cem­ber 1791 and Jan­u­ary 1792. These records were an­a­lyzed with the cor­re­spond­ing pe­ri­ods in 1790/1 and 1792/3.

The deaths of 3,442 adult men and 1,569 adult wom­en were recorded over these pe­ri­ods. Tu­ber­cu­losis and re­lat­ed con­di­tions were found to ac­count for the high­est num­ber of deaths. Ca­chex­ia and mal­nu­tri­tion ac­counted for the sec­ond high­est num­ber of deaths, and ede­ma, or body tis­sue swell­ing, was the third most com­mon cause of death, the in­ves­ti­ga­tors re­ported.

In the weeks sur­round­ing Mo­zart’s death, there was a marked in­crease in deaths from ede­ma among young­er men. This mi­nor ep­i­dem­ic may have orig­i­nat­ed in a nearby mil­i­tary hos­pi­tal, ac­cord­ing to the re­search­ers.

Their anal­y­sis sug­gests Moz­art may have died from acute ne­phrit­ic syn­drome, a com­plica­t­ion that could stem from strep­to­coc­cal in­fec­tion. Ne­phrit­ic syn­drome is a dis­or­der of clus­ters of mi­cro­scop­ic blood ves­sels in the kid­neys, and is char­ac­ter­ized by body swell­ing, high blood pres­sure, and red blood cells in the urine.

source : http://www.world-science.net/exclusives/090817_mozart.htm