Ashwin B. Mehta

Left atrial spindle cell sarcoma – Case report

Primary spindle cell sarcoma of the left atrium is an extremely rare tumour. Surgical excision is the mainstay of treatment since it responds poorly to chemotherapy or radiotherapy. In spite of all the treatment, the prognosis remains poor due to inadvertent delay in diagnosis, few therapeutic options and propensity to metastasize. We present a 47-year-old male who underwent a surgical excision of a left atrial mass in February 2010. It was proved to be a high-grade spindle cell sarcoma on histopathology. He presented again in October 2010 with recurrence of the tumour for which he was re-operated. However, the tumour recurred again within one month, to which the patient succumbed.

Predictors of success in Percutaneous Coronary Intervention for Chronic Total Occlusion

We performed a retrospective analysis of 146 chronic total occlusion CTO patients to evaluate the antecedents of success and failure in CTO – Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (PCI) in Indian patients. The study aimed to identify the technical success rate, analyse immediate patient outcomes, and understand the factors impacting the successful outcomes. Our results showed that J-CTO (Multicenter CTO Registry of Japan) scores correlate well with the success rates of CTO-PCI and two most important factors deciding failure are lesion length more than 20 mm and lesions with calcification. Most important step to success of CTO is wiring, once wire crosses the segment, success rates of the procedure is around 97%. The wire escalation strategy has to be modified once the initial soft (polymer) wire fails, it’s reasonable to use high tip load wire like conquest pro without the use of intermediate wires (except in presence of tortuosity). At 1 year follow up of these patients, there was a statistically significant drop in angina class and major adverse cardiac event rates in the successful CTO group.

Rotastenting in an anomalously arising right coronary artery after an ugly dissection.

Rotational atherectomy is contraindicated in dissected coronary arteries since it can lead to progression of the dissection or perforation. In our case, the right coronary artery (RCA) arose anomalously from the left coronary sinus. The lesion in the RCA was an undilatable calcified one. There was a dissection in the RCA due to high pressure balloon dilatation. Since the patient was hemodynamically unstable and there were no options besides rotablation, we proceeded with caution. Rotablation and stenting were successfully done. Our case report highlights the importance of the need for good guide catheter support even in the presence of anomalously arising arteries and the rotablation option for unyielding calcified coronary lesions, even in the setting of a dissection.