Treatment for heart disease and its risk factors ranges from making heart-healthy changes in your lifestyle, to taking medication, to having a medical procedure. You and your doctor can decide together what’s best for you.
Lifestyle Changes
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Did You Know?
Heart disease can strike women in the prime of life. Like men, women can develop heart disease at any point, whether they're 40 or 80. |
Adopting new habits such as eating more heart-healthy foods, getting more active, keeping weight under control and not smoking can make an impact on heart disease risk factors such as cholesterol and blood pressure.
Medications
While lifestyle changes are the first step in reducing heart disease, sometimes they’re not enough. In this case, your doctor may prescribe medication in addition to lifestyle changes.
Examples of medications to treat heart disease and its risk factors:
Aspirin. Decreases pain and inflammation and inhibits blood clots. It can significantly reduce heart damage during a heart attack and can lower the risk of a heart attack for those who have already had one. While aspirin has many heart benefits, it does have its risks, so you should talk with your doctor about whether taking aspirin is right for you.
Antiplatelets. Prevents formation of blood clots, which can lead to heart attack or stroke.
Digitalis. Makes the heart contract harder and is used when the heart’s pumping function has been weakened; it also slows some fast heart rhythms.
ACE (Angiotensin converting enzyme) inhibitor. Prevents blood vessels from constricting, which reduces the heart’s workload. Helps control high blood pressure, to prevent or treat congestive heart failure and to decrease risk of heart attack or stroke.
Beta blocker. Slows the heart and makes it beat with less contracting force so blood pressure drops and the heart doesn’t have to work as hard. It is used for high blood pressure, chest pain, and to prevent a repeat heart attack.
Nitrates (including nitroglycerine). Relaxes blood vessels and increases supply of blood and oxygen to the heart to stop chest pain.
Calcium-channel blocker. Relaxes blood vessels and treats high blood pressure and chest pain.
Diuretics. Also known as water pills, these decrease excess fluid in the body. Often used for high blood pressure.
Statins. Decrease LDL cholesterol levels in the blood.
Thrombolytic agents. Also called clot-busting drugs, these are given during a heart attack to break up a blood clot in a coronary artery to restore blood flow. They are most effective if given within the first hour after a heart attack begins.
Medical Procedures to Treat Heart Disease
If you have advanced heart disease, blocked arteries or other severe symptoms, you may need special procedures to open your arteries to improve blood flow.
Angioplasty and Stenting
Coronary angioplasty, also known as balloon angioplasty, uses minimally invasive cardiac catheterization to widen arteries. The cardiologist threads a balloon-tipped catheter to the site of a narrowed or blocked artery and then inflates the balloon to open the vessel.
Vascular stenting, which is often performed at the same time as angioplasty, involves placing a small wire mesh tube called a stent in your newly opened artery. The stent is a permanent device that is left in the artery to help keep the artery open.
Coronary Artery Bypass Graft Surgery
A coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) is a surgical procedure in which blood is rerouted around clogged arteries to improve the blood supply to the heart. The surgery uses a piece of a vein from the leg or an artery from the chest or wrist. The surgeon attaches this to the coronary artery above and below the narrowed area or blockage. This allows blood to bypass the blockage.
Off-Pump Bypass Surgery
CABG can be performed traditionally using a heart-lung machine and stopping the heart, or with off-pump — or beating heart —bypass surgery, a newer method. Off-pump bypass allows the heart to continue its natural beating during surgery. This is a highly specialized procedure performed only by experienced surgeons.
Performing off-pump CABG offer patients several advantages, including fewer blood transfusions, less memory loss, faster recovery and a lower risk of kidney problems.
The off-pump procedure offers additional advantages to women. Women in general are at a higher risk for transfusions during traditional bypass surgery. These transfusions are an independent risk factor for worse outcomes. But off-pump procedures lower the incidence of transfusions, which in turn results in a better outcome.