SCAD: Spontaneous coronary artery dissection
An uncommon form of heart attack, called SCAD, is known to affect young women mostly.
SCAD is a medically critical condition which occurs when there is a tear or rupture in the blood vessel of the heart. In most cases it leads to arrhythmia and sudden death.
As per health reports, SCAD affects young women, mostly who are in their 40s and 50s.
Heart attacks caused by SCAD are different from the heart attacks that happen due to atherosclerosis.
What exactly happens in SCAD?
The wall of the artery is triple layered. When one of the layers of the artery gets ruptured either the blood flow slows down or else the blood passes through the rupture and gets trapped within the layers of the wall. The trapped blood forms a bulge and obstructs the flow of the blood to the heart leading to heart attack.
SCAD is uncommon but life threatening because its symptoms are difficult to identify. The patients often don't have typical heart disease risk factors.
What are the symptoms?
As per MayoClinic, the common symptoms associated with SCAD are chest pain, rapid heartbeat, pain in the limbs and jaw, breathing difficulty, sweating, extreme tiredness, nausea and dizziness.
The American Heart Association includes chest pain or pressure, shortness of breath, profuse sweating and dizziness in the list of SCAD symptoms.
"SCAD patients have a high risk of recurrence"
The American Heart Association says SCAD patients have a high risk of recurrence and suggests taking care of common risks of the heart like high blood pressure, smoking or high cholesterol might help.
SCAD can happen in people even after a successful treatment procedure.
New study has identified 16 genes that increase risk of SCAD in women
A study conducted by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Leicester Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) and Universite Paris Cite has identified 16 genes that increase the risk of this heart attack in women.
“This research confirms that there are multiple genes involved in determining the risk of a person having a SCAD. These genes give us the first key insight into the underlying causes of this disease and provide new lines of enquiry, which we hope will guide future new treatment approaches," ANI quoted Dr David Adlam, Associate Professor of Acute and Interventional Cardiology at the University of Leicester, and lead author of the study saying.
What are the known risk factors?
Since it affects women more, gender is definitely an important risk factor for SCAD.
Fibromuscular dysplasia, an irregular growth of cells in the artery walls, is another big risk factor that leads to SCAD. It has been found that women are more likely to develop Fibromuscular dysplasia than men which makes them more prone to developing SCAD.
Genetic reasons like diseases associated with connective tissue, vascular Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and Marfan syndrome are also associated with SCAD.
Extremely high blood pressure is also associated with SCAD.
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