Coronary artery spasm was first proposed as a cause of spontaneous, recurring angina1 attacks over a century ago (1). Because this brilliant clinical intuition could not be demonstrated at postmortem study, it fell into progressive disrepute until, in the early 1950s coronary artery spasm was considered “the resort of the diagnostically destitute” (2). In 1959, the notion of coronary artery spa...

BACKGROUND Risk factors for pure coronary spasm are not known. Clinical observations have pointed to cigarette smoking, a known risk factor for obstructive coronary artery disease. METHODS AND RESULTS We conducted a case-neighborhood control study of premenopausal women, a population segment with the lowest prevalence of obstructive coronary artery disease. The cases were 21 premenopausal wom...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the association between primary hemifacial spasm and arterial hypertension. SUBJECTS 114 patients with primary hemifacial spasm and 228 neurological controls, matched for age, sex, and referral centre, were recruited during an 18 month period from consecutive outpatients attending two neurological institutions. DESIGN The association between exposure variables and c...

Coronary artery spasm is an uncommon, but well recognized, etiology for acute myocardial infarction. However, cardiogenic shock with myocardial infarction resulting from simultaneous multiple coronary artery spasm has been rarely reported, and not in Korea. Recently, we experienced such a case in a 50-year-old Korean man without previous diagnosis of variant angina. The patient, hospitalized fo...

spasm quickly spreads to the right side of the face, and as it does so the patient places his right hand on the right side of his face and his left on his vertex. The spasm seizes the right sterno-mastoid and muscles of the right side of the neck so that the head is drawn by tetanic spasm downwards and to the right, the chin being turned to the left. The patient remains in this attitude moaning...

Vascular responses to ergometrine were compared in groups of patients subject to coronary artery spasm, or oesophageal spasm, or neither. We measured the degree of diffuse narrowing at different coronary artery sites (not in spasm), and the rise in blood pressure. The data provide no evidence for a generalised sensitivity to alpha-adrenergic stimulation underlying either of these two clinical e...

Intracisternal injection of blood in the rat produces an angiographically demonstrable biphasic vasospasm. Lesioning at the level of the mesencephalon of the ascending catecholamine pathways from locus coeruleus in the pons and the A1 and A2 nuclei in the medulla oblongata prior to cisternal blood injection prevents the development of both acute and late spasm. Selective lesioning in the medull...

OBJECTIVE To investigate brain areas involved in the initiation and execution of eyelid spasm in patients with benign essential blepharospasm. METHODS The authors used fMRI and correlated the blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signal with epochs of frequent eyelid spasm in six patients and with epochs of voluntary eye blinks in four healthy subjects. RESULTS Spasm epochs were accompan...

The purpose of this article is to record a clinical and experimental study of muscle changes noted in a recent epidemic of poliomyelitis in New Zealand. The term muscle spasm has come into general use to describe those changes which occur in the acute stages of the disease and has to be distinguished from the state of contracture which is a terminal condition of muscle shortening due to fibrosi...

We injected acetylcholine (ACh), the neurotransmitter of the parasympathetic nervous system, into the coronary arteries of 28 patients with variant angina. Injection of 10 to 80 gg ACh into the coronary artery responsible for the attack induced spasm together with chest pain and ST segment elevation or depression on the electrocardiogram in 30 of the 32 arteries of 25 of the 27 patients. The in...