Ahmedabad: This heart doctor has a winking artery sign to his name

AHMEDABAD: When south Indian actress Priya Prakash Varrier winked in a video that went viral, it flipped millions of hearts online. In Ahmedabad, a heart doctor found his pulse racing when he spotted a coronary artery winking at him some 10 years ago.
The cardiologist chased the winking artery and has been recently rewarded with an eponym - Kamal Sharma sign - by the prestigious Indian Heart Journal, the official journal of Cardiological Society of India.Essentially, this sign can indicate Ventricular Septal Rupture (VSR), a serious complication of heart attack, with which a patient has a 99% chance of dying if left untreated.
Cardiologist and associate professor of cardiology at UN Mehta Institute of Cardiology and Research Centre Dr Kamal Sharma says that in 2-3% heart attack cases, the muscle between two heart chambers ruptures; the condition is called VSR. This is a life-threatening complication."The coronary artery runs over the heart muscle. If there is a rupture, during contraction and relaxation, the artery becomes temporarily compressed, making it seem that it is winking at the doctor," says Dr Sharma. "This is suggestive of an unsupported muscle below."
Earlier in 2017, Dr Sharma's research on 15 VSR patients was published in the Journal of Cardiovascular Medicine and Surgery. It revealed that all VSR patients showed the 'winking coronary sign'.