Background: Spontaneous coronary artery dissection (SCAD) is an increasingly recognized cause of acute coronary syndrome in young women, with a wide clinical spectrum of severity. Ventricular arrhythmia (VA) can occur and worsen prognosis. The current study compared in-hospital and follow-up adverse cardiovascular events in patients with and without VA at presentation.
Methods: Eighty-three cases of SCAD were collected retrospectively from 4 Gulf countries (KSA, UAE, Kuwait, and Bahrain) during the period from January 2011 to December 2017. We divided the patients into 2 groups: those with and without VA at presentation. VA was defined as ventricular tachycardia and/or ventricular fibrillation. In-hospital (recurrent VA, cardiogenic shock, death, implantable cardioverter-defibrillator placement, dissection extension) and follow-up (MI, de novo SCAD, death, spontaneous superior mesenteric artery dissection) events were compared among the 2 groups.
Results: The median age of patients in the study was 44 (37-55) years. Forty-two (51%) were women. VA occurred in 10 (12%) patients in the first 24-hour of hospitalization, and 5 (50%) of those patients had recurrent in-hospital VA. Among those with recurrent VA, 1 died during hospitalization and 1 died within the first year following hospital discharge.
Conclusions: In-hospital adverse cardiovascular events were significantly more frequent for patients with SCAD who presented with VA. However, follow-up events were not statistically significant between those with and without VA at presentation.