Egyptian coronary arteries: are they small?

ABSTRACT

Coronary size is one of the factors influencing the outcome of coronary interventions. This study was planned to screen main coronary arteries size in Egyptians in order to prove or disprove that Egyptians have small coronary arteries and to compare them to other races. 524 patients referred for coronary angiography were included in this study with no proximal local atheroma, spasm complete obstruction, stenosis nor multiple stenosis in the same vessel. Patients were divided into 3 age groups and were subjected to QCA for determination of the diameters of different segments of each coronary artery. The reference vessel diameter and cross sectional area were calculated for each, artery. In our study the influence of age, sex, hypertension [HTN] diabetes mellitus [DM], dyslipidemia and body surface area on coronary artery size were variable. The left main diameter was influenced by NTN, DM. and smoking; the left anterior descending diameter big age, HTN, and sex; the left circumflex diameter by age and RCA diameter by age and DM. Comparing our results to other races in different studies, we found the same range of Egyptian coronary artery size as other Caucasians, larger than Indo-Asians and comparable to the Americans. So, we concluded that Egyptians have large coronary arteries not small ones as we had expected