No Obstruction Shouldn't Mean No Diagnosis: HARP-MINOCA in Context

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Michelle L. O'Donoghue, MD: Hi. I'm Dr Michelle O'Donoghue, reporting for Medscape. Joining me today is Dr Harmony Reynolds. She is the director of the Soter Center for Women's Cardiovascular Research at New York University (NYU) Langone Health. Welcome, Harmony.

Harmony R. Reynolds, MD: Thank you so much, Dr O'Donoghue. I'm pleased to be here.

O'Donoghue: Thank you so much for joining me. We are just coming off the heels of the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions, and your presentation was one of the more interesting ones. It touched upon the field of myocardial infarction with nonobstructive coronary arteries (MINOCA), which has been very poorly understood. Could you lead off by walking us through the top-line findings from your study?

MINOCA and Atherosclerosis

Reynolds:Sure, thanks. We enrolled women who had myocardial infarction (MI) and were being referred for cardiac catheterization to evaluate their MI. The referring physicians expected that they were sending them for revascularization, but we knew that some of them would have MINOCA. Women who had MINOCA had multivessel optical coherence tomography (OCT) of the coronary arteries, and then cardiac MRI within a week. We found that between those two imaging tests, we were able to find an underlying cause of the MINOCA presentation in 85%, and most of those (two thirds of the women overall) had findings pointing to MI as the cause of their presentation.