IJCS | Volume 31, Nº2, March / April 2018

101 Figure 1 – LITA with stenosis. Figure 2 – LITA with stenosis after nitroglycerin infusion. Balzan et al. Atherosclerosis in the internal thoracic artery Int J Cardiovasc Sci. 2018;31(2)97-106 Original Article performed due to the high prevalence of lesions that may make it unfeasible, with possible future complications to the patient submitted to the surgical treatment. In contrast, Perić et al. 19 also analyzed by means of selective angiography the characteristics of LITA and its anatomical variations, in 80 randomly selected patients, and different from that found in the studies cited previously, no patient presented atherosclerosis in LITA. However, the degree of anatomical variations was greater, about 13.25%of the LITAs evaluated, proving that the indication of selective angiography in all patients who would use the LITA graft for myocardial revascularization may be necessary. The disagreement regarding the presence of atherosclerosis between the studies, and even in our study, can be attributed to the population used as the basis for each author, since Sons et al. 17 and Chen et al. 18 evaluated patients candidates for surgical correction of myocardium, as the present study, unlike Perić et al. 19 , who randomly