Dynamic Coronary Thrombosis: A possible cause of Prinzmetal’s Variant Angina.
By Amin H. Karim MD
Dr. Albert E. Raizner was the Director of Cardiac Cath Lab at the Houston Methodist Hospital while it was still affiliated with Baylor College of Medicine and even after it dissociated from Baylor. He was my teacher when I did my Cardiology General and Interventional Fellowship at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas. He and I were very interested in coronary spasm in the days when thrombolysis was the primary treatment of acute coronary syndromes; it would be followed by “rescue” angioplasty if the ST segments remained elevated or there was post infarction angina or residual ischemia. We would come across cases where there was spasm in the coronary artery even without the diagnostic catheter tickling the intima. This lead us to surmise that maybe the presence of thrombus in the artery itself caused the spasm. The paper, we co-authored by another researcher of coronary spasm Dr. Robert A. Chahine, University of Miami School of Medicine, Florida, was published in the Journal of Interventional Cardiology, Vol 3, No. 1, 1990.
Dr. Raizner is now semi retired.
GlobeMedic 