Postmortem angiography demonstrates that intercoronary anastomoses are universally present in adult hearts and increase significantly with >50% coronary artery narrowing, suggesting a compensatory defense mechanism.
Intercoronary anastomoses may compensate for coronary narrowing; this Level 4 observation leaves open their in vivo functional or prognostic relevance.
Intercoronary arterial anastomoses were studied in 160 nonselected adult human hearts ranging in age 15 to 88 years, using postmortem coronary angiography. All the hearts in this series revealed the existence of inter-coronary arterial anastomoses between the major divisions of the coronary trees. The results of this study also revealed that the anastomotic channels were remarkably Increased when over one-half reduction in diameter of the main coronary artery occurs. On the basis of those findings, it is suggested that the collateral channel would be regarded as a congenital defence mechanism against coronary insufficiency, and the coronary structure induced the development of the Intercoronary arterial anastomoses which are dependent on the degree of narrowing of the arterial lumen; namely, the remarkable coronary anastomoses were invariably associated with the reduction to one-half of the normal diameter.
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Goro Tsuchiya (1971) studied this question.
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