Acute myocardial infarction: Review on risk factors, etiologies, angiographic characteristics and outcomes in young patients

Abstract

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in adults around the world. Young adult population has suffered changes in lifestyle over the decades, favoring the appearance of atherosclerosis at early ages, and as a consequence, the incidence of cardiovascular events emerges prematurely. It has been identified that most common risk factors are potentially modifiable. There is a greater prevalence of non-atherosclerotic etiologies of myocardial infarction such as spontaneous coronary dissection, congenital malformations, coronary embolism, and coronary spasm. Different angiographic findings and outcomes according to age and gender have been recognized. For this reason, we searched PubMed for published research and registries for the study of acute myocardial infarction in young patients. With this data, we carried out the present review to better understand the common findings in this group, and to compare them with older age groups.