A 25-year-old man arrived at a hospital in Australia with severe chest pain and signs of a major heart attack. Doctors found a spontaneous tear in one of his heart arteries. Then imaging revealed something stranger: the wall of his heart's main pumping chamber had a jagged, serrated edge.
Cardiologists at the Gold Coast Hospital and Health Service in Queensland diagnosed spontaneous coronary artery dissection, or SCAD, together with saw-tooth cardiomyopathy, which they described as "an exceptionally rare form of left ventricular dysplasia." In their report in JACC: Case Reports, published in September 2026, the authors say the two conditions had not been reported together before.
