Angina chest discomfort is the most common symptom of CAD. Some people describe this discomfort as:. These symptoms can also be mistaken for heartburn or indigestion. You may experience more symptoms when your blood flow is more restricted. If a blockage cuts off blood flow completely or almost completely, your heart muscle will start to die if not restored.
This is a heart attack. Immediate medical treatment is necessary. Men have a higher risk of developing heart disease than premenopausal women. Postmenopausal women by age 70 have the same risk as men. Understanding the risk factors for CAD can help with your plan to prevent or decrease the likelihood of developing the disease.
The risk for CAD also increases with age. Based on age alone as a risk factor, men have a greater risk for the disease beginning at age 45 and women have a greater risk beginning at age The risk for coronary artery disease is also higher if you have a family history of the disease.
Diagnosing CAD requires a review of your medical history, a physical examination, and other medical testing. These tests include:. Coronary computed tomographic angiography to show the insides of your coronary arteries rather than an invasive cardiac catheterization.
It is a noninvasive imaging test using CT scanning. Treatment - Coronary Heart Disease. Heart-healthy lifestyle changes. Your doctor may recommend that you adopt lifelong heart-healthy lifestyle changes, including: Aiming for a healthy weight. Greater amounts of weight loss can also improve blood pressure readings. Being physically active. Routine physical activity can help manage coronary heart disease risk factors such as high blood cholesterol, high blood pressure, or overweight and obesity.
Before starting any exercise program, ask your doctor what level of physical activity is right for you. A heart-healthy eating plan includes fruits, vegetables, and whole grains and limits saturated fats, trans fats, sodium salt , added sugars, and alcohol.
Managing stress. Learning how to manage stress, relax, and cope with problems can improve your emotional and physical health. Quitting smoking. Although these resources focus on heart health, they include basic information about how to quit smoking. Talk to your doctor if you vape. There is scientific evidence that nicotine and flavorings found in vaping products may damage your heart and lungs.
Get enough good-quality sleep. The recommended amount for adults is 7 to 9 hours of sleep a day. ACE inhibitors and beta blockers to help lower blood pressure and decrease the heart's workload. Calcium channel blockers to lower blood pressure by allowing blood vessels to relax. Medicines to control blood sugar, such as empagliflozin, canagliflozin, and liraglutide, to help lower your risk for complications if you have coronary heart disease and diabetes. Metformin to control plaque buildup if you have diabetes.
Nitrates, such as nitroglycerin, to dilate your coronary arteries and relieve or prevent chest pain from angina. Ranolazine to treat coronary microvascular disease and the chest pain it may cause. Your doctor may recommend statin therapy if you have a higher risk for coronary heart disease or stroke or if you have diabetes and are between ages 40 and Non-statin therapies may be used to reduce cholesterol when statins do not lower cholesterol enough or cause side effects.
Your doctor may prescribe non-statin drugs, such as, ezetimibe, bile acid sequestrants, alirocumab, or evolocumab to lower cholesterol or omega-3 fatty acids, gemfibrozil, or fenofibrate to reduce triglycerides. Percutaneous coronary intervention PCI to open coronary arteries that are narrowed or blocked by the buildup of atherosclerotic plaque.
A small mesh tube called a stent is usually implanted after PCI to prevent the artery from narrowing again. Coronary artery bypass grafting CABG to improve blood flow to the heart by using normal arteries from the chest wall and veins from the legs to bypass the blocked arteries.
Surgeons typically use CABG to treat people who have severe obstructive coronary artery disease in multiple coronary arteries. Transmyocardial laser revascularization or coronary endarterectomy to treat severe angina associated with coronary heart disease when other treatments are too risky or did not work.
Living With - Coronary Heart Disease. Receive follow-up care. Cardiac rehabilitation. Prevent complications over your lifetime. In addition: You will likely be given a statin to lower your LDL cholesterol , especially after a heart attack. Your doctor may recommend aspirin to prevent a heart attack or stroke. Low-dose aspirin may help prevent blood clots and lower the risk for heart attacks and other complications of coronary heart disease for some people, particularly those with microvascular disease or who have diabetes.
Talk to your doctor before taking aspirin, because it raises the risk of serious bleeding. If you have diabetes, you will need to check your blood sugar regularly and keep taking any prescribed medicines.
If your coronary heart disease becomes unstable or has led to a heart attack or sudden cardiac arrest, your doctor may recommend a pacemaker or defibrillator to detect and treat certain types of serious arrhythmias.
Take care of your mental health. Your doctor may talk to you about: Talking to a professional counselor.
If you have depression or anxiety, your doctor also may recommend medicines or other treatments that can improve your quality of life. Joining a patient support group. This may help you adjust to living with heart disease. You can find out how other people manage similar symptoms. Your doctor may be able to recommend local support groups, or you can check with an area medical center. Seeking support from family and friends.
Letting your loved ones know how you feel and what they can do to help you can help relieve stress and anxiety. Learn the warning signs of serious complications and have a plan. Heart attack The signs and symptoms of a heart attack include: Prolonged or severe chest pain or discomfort not relieved by rest or nitroglycerin.
This involves uncomfortable pressure, squeezing, fullness, or pain in the center or left side of the chest that can be mild or strong. This pain or discomfort often lasts more than a few minutes or goes away and comes back. Nausea, vomiting, light-headedness or fainting, or breaking out in a cold sweat. These symptoms of a heart attack are more common in women. Shortness of breath. This may accompany chest discomfort or happen before it.
Upper body discomfort. This can be felt in one or both arms, the back, neck, jaw, or upper part of the stomach. Why does coronary heart disease affect women differently? Before menopause, the hormone estrogen provides women with some protection against coronary artery disease. The size and structure of the heart is different for women and men.
Women are more likely to have nonobstructive coronary heart disease or coronary microvascular disease. These types are harder to diagnose than obstructive coronary artery disease, which can be harder to diagnose. This can cause delays in getting diagnosed and treated. What factors affect risk for women differently? Anemia , especially during pregnancy Early menopause before age 40 Endometriosis High blood pressure after age 65 History of problems during pregnancy, including gestational diabetes, preeclampsia , eclampsia high blood pressure during pregnancy , and giving birth to a baby who is premature or smaller than average.
Can symptoms differ for women? Activity that brings on chest pain. In men, angina tends to worsen with physical activity and go away with rest. Women are more likely than men to have angina while they are resting.
In women who have coronary microvascular disease, angina often happens during routine daily activities, such as shopping or cooking, rather than during exercise. Microvascular angina events may last longer and be more painful than other types of angina. Location and type of pain.
Pain symptoms are different for each person. Women having angina or a heart attack often describe their chest pain as crushing, or they say it feels like pressure, squeezing, or tightness. Women may have pain in the chest or the neck and throat.
Mental stress. Mental stress is more likely to trigger angina pain in women than in men. Other symptoms. Common signs and symptoms for women include nausea, vomiting, shortness of breath, abdominal pain, sleep problems, fatigue , and lack of energy. What do women need to know about diagnosis and treatment? Ask about important diagnostic tests. Doctors are less likely to refer women for diagnostic tests for coronary heart disease. When women go to the hospital for heart symptoms, they are more likely than men to experience delays receiving an initial EKG, are less likely to receive care from a heart specialist during hospitalization, and are less likely to receive certain types of therapy and medicines.
Younger women are more likely than men to be misdiagnosed and sent home from the emergency department after cardiac events that occur from undiagnosed and untreated vascular heart disease. Ask about treatment options that are effective for men and women.
Women may be less likely than men to receive aspirin, statins, and beta blockers for treating their heart disease. Although women may be as likely as men to benefit from a pacemaker or a defibrillator, women are less likely to receive these treatments for complications of coronary heart disease. Women are often less likely to receive percutaneous coronary intervention or coronary artery bypass grafting than men are, even though research shows that both men and women can benefit from these procedures.
Know and share your risk factors. Commonly used risk-scoring systems may not accurately predict risk in women. Also, in one survey, fewer than one in four women reported that their doctors had ever discussed their risk for heart disease. Learn the symptoms and seek medical care right away. Being familiar with the symptoms of coronary heart disease and how they may differ in women may help you recognize when to talk to your doctor or when to seek medical care.
Immediate care may help prevent complications such as heart attack or sudden cardiac arrest. Research for Your Health. Improving health with current research. Long-standing Leadership in Cardiovascular Diseases. Visit Heart and Vascular Diseases to learn more. We support the development of guidelines based on up-to-date research to evaluate and manage risk of coronary heart disease in children and adolescents.
Through the FHS, scientists learned that many of those risks can be changed. Such findings are paving the way for new interventions to preempt, prevent, or treat these conditions more effectively.
FHS discoveries have changed the way Americans look at—and get treated for—heart disease. This trans-NIH collaborative research effort aims to understand and reduce the impact of chronic health conditions that affect people living with HIV.
Global Leadership in Cardiovascular Health. We are proud to serve as a global leader and respond to legislative calls to increase U. The Health Inequities and Global Health Branch seeks to stimulate global health research, education, and training for many conditions, including coronary heart disease. The initiative provided evidence that hormone replacement therapy does not protect older postmenopausal women from coronary heart disease and its complications.
As a result, doctors no longer routinely prescribe long-term hormone therapy for postmenopausal women. The WISE study , which started in , is advancing the understanding of heart disease in women, leading to improved diagnosis and treatment. Most of what is known about coronary microvascular disease comes from the study. WISE researchers are now studying women who have coronary microvascular disease or nonobstructive coronary artery disease to find ways to prevent heart failure. This raises the risk of diabetes and coronary heart disease, even in people who have a low body weight.
The American Heart Association used MASALA data in its cholesterol guidelines, which recommend that South Asians be considered a high-risk group and therefore carefully considered for statin treatment. The Cardiothoracic Surgical Trials Network CTSN is an international network that studies heart valve disease, arrhythmias, heart failure, coronary heart disease, and the complications of surgery. CTSN researchers have studied the success of treatments for people who have atrial fibrillation and need heart valve surgery.
For example, they compared rate control and rhythm control as a first treatment after surgery. The strategies were equally effective at treating atrial fibrillation and preventing complications.
In studies using mice, NHLBI-supported researchers discovered a previously unknown mechanism between the brain, bone marrow, and blood vessels that appears to protect against the development of atherosclerosis—but only when sleep is healthy and sound. The discovery of this pathway underscores the importance of getting enough quality sleep to maintain heart health and could provide new targets for fighting heart disease. Visit Study helps solve mystery of how sleep protects against heart disease to learn more.
Thirty years of data from large population studies provide evidence of a link between depression and coronary heart disease. NHLBI-sponsored research is tackling the question of whether depression causes heart disease or whether depression is a risk factor on its own.
In these people, cardiac rehab can help improve quality of life and can help prevent another cardiac event. Cardiac rehab is a supervised program that includes. A team of people may help you through cardiac rehab, including your health care team, exercise and nutrition specialists, physical therapists, and counselors or mental health professionals. If you have CAD, your health care team may suggest the following steps to help lower your risk for heart attack or worsening heart disease:.
Skip directly to site content Skip directly to page options Skip directly to A-Z link. Heart Disease. Section Navigation.
Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Syndicate. Minus Related Pages. Close Coronary artery disease is caused by plaque buildup in the wall of the arteries that supply blood to the heart called coronary arteries.
Heart tests and what they do. Echocardiogram Uses ultrasound special sound wave to create a picture of the heart. Exercise stress test Measures your heart rate while you walk on a treadmill. Keeping your heart healthy will also have other health benefits, such as helping reduce your risk of stroke and dementia.
The heart is a muscle about the size of your fist. It pumps blood around your body and beats approximately 70 times a minute. After the blood leaves the right side of the heart, it goes to your lungs where it picks up oxygen.
The oxygen-rich blood returns to your heart and is then pumped to the body's organs through a network of arteries. The blood returns to your heart through veins before being pumped back to your lungs again. This process is called circulation.
0コメント