Myocardial bridges

Recently, many cases of sudden death on strenuous exercise attributed to muscular bridges on the coronary arteries have been reported in the literature. The incidence of such bridges, pooling all reports, is 5.4-85.7% of autopsies. In the present study, 30 hearts from postmortems and 76 hearts from departmental collections from embalmed cadavers (making a total of 106 hearts) were studied. Fifteen hearts (14.2%) showed muscular bridges. The length of the bridges varied from 4mm to 40mm, the majority being 10-19mm in length. Only two arteries viz, the left anterior descending artery and the left diagonal artery showed muscular bridges.