If you've been diagnosed with coronary microvascular disease, getting adequate blood flow to your heart is critical.  Lifestyle changes are the most effective treatment.

Treatment goals for coronary MVD are three-fold – stop it from getting worse, improve quality of life by relieving symptoms, and prevent a heart attack.  Standard invasive treatments for coronary heart disease (CAD), such as angioplasty, stenting and bypass surgery, aren't used to treat coronary MVD.  Instead, treatment focuses on reducing risk through managing underlying conditions.

Talk to your doctor about your risk factors for heart disease and how to control them.

• Know your numbers-ask your doctor for these three tests and have the results explained to you.
• Lipid profile. This test measures total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol (often called bad cholesterol), HDL cholesterol (often called good cholesterol), and triglycerides (another form of fat in the blood).
• Blood pressure.
• Fasting blood glucose. This test is for diabetes.
• Know your body mass index (BMI) and waist circumference. BMI is an estimate of body fat that's calculated from your height and weight. You can use the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute's online BMI calculator to figure out your BMI. To measure your waistline, stand and place a tape measure around your middle, just above your hipbones. Measure your waist just after you breathe out.
• Know your symptoms and how and when to seek medical help. Be able to describe the usual pattern of your symptoms.  Know how to control them.   
• Know which medicines you take and when and how to take them.
• Know the limits of your physical activity.

Make heart-healthy lifestyle changes to reduce your risk factors.  You can't control some risk factors of heart disease such as age and family history.  However, you can take aggressive steps to lower or control other risk factors such as high blood pressure, overweight and obesity, high blood cholesterol, diabetes and smoking.

• Follow a heart healthy eating plan. Two heart healthy eating plans are the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet (for people who have high blood pressure) and the Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes (TLC) diet (for people who have high blood cholesterol).
• Increase your physical activity. Aim for at least 30 minutes of moderate-intensity activity on most, and preferably, all days of the week. If you're trying to manage your weight and keep from gaining weight, try to get 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous-intensity physical activity on most days of the week.
• Quit smoking, if you smoke.
• Lose weight, if you're overweight.
• Learn ways to avoid or cope with stress

Take medicines as your doctor prescribes. 

• Standard anti-angina drugs that work by relaxing blood vessels, such as nitroglycerin, can help ease symptoms. Nitroglycerin is prescribed to relax blood vessels, improve blood flow to the heart muscle, and treat chest pain.
• High cholesterol and high blood pressure are almost certainly among the causes of microvascular disease.  In addition to diet and exercise, lipid-lowering drugs like statins can be used to improve cholesterol levels and beta blockers, calcium-channel blockers or vasodilators to lower blood pressure and decrease the heart's workload.
• If you have diabetes, check your blood sugar level every day to make sure your medicines and diet and exercise are working to keep it in a normal range.  Two out of three people with diabetes die from heart disease and stroke.
• Low-dose aspirin can be used to help prevent blood clots or control inflammation.  Other blood clot reducers include anticoagulants and antiplatelets.

Treat anemia.  It slows repair of damaged blood vessels.  Anemia treatment depends on the cause and can involve iron supplements, folic acid or hormone injections, and blood transfusion, or antiplatelet drugs.  

Although a great deal of new knowledge about coronary MVD has been uncovered in the last decade, more work needs to be done.  Watch for new findings from the federally funded Women's Ischemia Syndrome Evaluation (WISE) study. 

Learn more about Coronary Microvascular Disease:

Key Point 1: When it comes to heart disease, not only are the symptoms sometimes different for men and women – but the disease itself may be different. 
 
Key Point 2:  Coronary microvascular disease is tough to diagnose.  If you are experiencing symptoms that concern you, don't ignore them.  You need to continue a dialog with your doctor until you're both satisfied.