Myocardial Infarction With Nonobstructive Coronary Arteries (MINOCA)

“As an interventional cardiologist, it's not uncommon for me to see patients come to the cath lab with signs and symptoms of a heart attack who have elevation in the enzymes, and then when they get the cardiac cath, they'll have nonobstructive disease or normal coronaries. Then later on you'll hear the house staff tell the patient: 'Oh everything's fine, you don't need anything, go home.'”

“A MINOCA diagnosis is not benign despite the apparently normal coronary arteries. Rates of mortality, reinfarction, rehospitalization and recurrent angina are not low.”

“Cardiology is undergoing a transition now from a pure focus on identifying patients with obstructive CAD and treating them aggressively, [sometimes] after they've had an MI, to moving sooner [due to] realizing that nonobstructive CAD is not benign—and that it is heterogeneous and that it is common and undertreated.”