Left Ventricular Thrombosis after Myocardial Infarction

To the Editor: Asinger et al. have made a solid contribution to our understanding of left ventricular thrombosis after acute myocardial infarction (August 6 issue).¹ Yet, one is astonished to note that the authors and the Journal's usually Olympian reviewers permit misleading use of the word “transmural.“ A large body of work performed from 1951 to 1980 has demonstrated that infarcts producing Q-waves and those with only ST-T changes cannot reliably identify transmural and nontransmural infarcts.^{2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16} Recent work also shows that the two echocardiographic patterns indicate comparable five-year survival¹⁷ and do not discriminate between single-vessel and multivessel disease.¹⁸ The report. . .