Women in interventional cardiology: The French experience.

Objectives: Exploring the discrepancy in sex-ratio among interventional cardiologists by analysing the population of the female interventionalist.

Background: Despite an increase number of women who graduate from medical school in France during the last generation today, women represent only 24% of all cardiologists and 3% are interventional cardiologists. To face this international gender-based issue of interventional cardiology, committees were established in US (WIN) and recently within the EAPCI: the Women EAPCI chaired by Drs Mehilli and Mauri.

Spontaneous coronary artery dissection in a 35 year-old woman with systemic lupus erythematosus successfully treated by angioplasty.

Spontaneous coronary artery dissection (SCAD) is an unusual cause of acute myocardial ischaemia with complex pathophysiology; it has been associated with several conditions such as atherosclerosis, connective tissue disorders and the peripartum period. SCAD has exceptionally been reported (three published cases) in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). In this work, we report the original case of a 35 year-old woman with a known history of SLE who presented with an acute coronary syndrome caused by an extensive dissection of the left anterior descending artery (LAD) and the diagonal and who was successfully treated by an intravascular ultrasound (IVUS)-guided percutaneous angioplasty.