Eosinophilia in cholesterol atheroembolic disease.

In atheroembolic disease, eosinophilia has been reported in up to 80% of the patients and is considered an important clue to the diagnosis.2 This condition is easily recognized when cholesterol microembolization takes place after arterial catheterization for procedures such as angiographies or percutaneous transluminal angioplasties. On the contrary, making a diagnosis gets harder when this phenomenon takes place spontaneously, so it is often missed or discovered only on postmortem examination. Eosinophilia that occurs together with other laboratory abnormalities (eg, leucocytosis, rise of inflammation markers, hypocomplementemia) and is associated with skin lesions and signs of visceral impairment—the kidney first among these—could direct clinicians toward a diagnosis of vasculitis,3 as in the case summarized in Table