The Significance Of Coronary Ectasia And Its Assesement Using Timi Frame Count

Coronary ectasia is dilatation of a coronary artery segment to≥1.5times the adjacent normalsegment. The aim of this study was to find out if there is a significant presence of coronary arteryectasia in the Chinese population, and its correlation with the TIMI frame count as anangiographic evaluation tool. We evaluated the angiograms of786patients who underwentcoronary angiography between the period of1/1/2010and31/6/2010. Of those assessed,31patients were found to have coronary artery ectasia, a prevalence of3.93%. The males were moreaffected than the females with a ratio of4.2:1(25males vs.6females). The higher prevalenceamong males can partly be explained by the fact that there is a higher incidence of coronaryartery disease amongst males than females27. Most of the coronary ectasia occurred in the Rightcoronary artery.When compared to controls, the TIMI frame count among patients with coronary ectasia and nostenosis (group1) was significantly increased (p=0.01), but not among patients with coronaryectasia and coexisting stenosis in the same vessel. This could be due the difference in underlyingetiology and hence pathology in each of these categories. However, we did not find a statisticallysignificant correlation between the ectasia ratio and TFC (p=0.817for patients with coronaryartery ectasia and no stenosis and p=0.878for patients with ectasia with coexisting stenosis).There was also no statistically significant correlation between the length of ectasia segment andthe TFC (p=0.72for those without stenosis and p=0.315for those with stenosis).In conclusion, the TIMI Frame Count is significantly increased in patients with CAE and nocoexisting stenosis, but not among patients with CAE and coexisting stenosis. The prevalence ofcoronary artery ectasia (3.93%) is significant enough to warrant development of a treatmentprotocol for CAE. Since the TIMI frame count is increased in patients with coronary ectasia andno stenosis, we believe that the TFC may be a good means to predict prognosis in patients withCAE and as such we recommend a prospective study to investigate this hypothesis.