Atypical vessels as an early sign of intracardiac myxoma?

Primary cardiac tumors are rare disorders, with an incidence of 0.02% at autopsy. Three quarters of the primary tumors of the heart are benign, half of which are myxomas [1].As noninvasive cardiac imaging becomes widely available, with increasing resolution provided by echocardiography, computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging, cardiac tumors are being diagnosed more often. Angiography, apart from its preoperative role to rule out concomitant coronary artery disease, is rarely needed for the diagnostic work-up of cardiac tumors.This report describes the delayed presentation of a left atrial myxoma which was not depicted in an initial coronary angiography performed 51 months earlier in a woman with chest pain.A 62-year-old woman with known metabolic syndrome was referred to our clinic to exclude coronary artery disease invasively. She has been experiencing chest pain for four months which has not increased in frequency or duration since it started. She denied pain at rest, nocturnal pain, difficulty breathing, or palpitations. An echocardiographic stress examination revealed significant ischemia with anteroseptal hypokinesia. Cardiac chambers were morphologically normal. The "baseline" echocardiography and stress echo was unsuspicious of a left atrial myxoma (Fig. 1).Coronary angiography revealed coronary artery disease with a stenosis of the proximal left anterior descending coronary artery (LAD) near the left main stem. A stent was implanted in the proximal LAD with no residual stenosis. The ventricle was morphologically normal.A coronary angiography performed 13 months after stent implantation showed no re-stenosis and a normal left ventricle. No echocardiogram was performed at this time 32 months after the control coronary angiography, the patient was readmitted because of increasing dyspnoea and palpitations. A transthoracic echocardiography disclosed a big (70 × 30 mm) mass in the left atrium attached to the interatrial septum. The tumor prolapsed int