Dear Doctors: I’m a 38-year-old woman in good health. I kept getting a tight chest while running, so my doctor did some tests. He said my heart looked fine. But when I went for a second opinion, I was diagnosed with microvascular disease. I’ve never even heard of that before. What is it? Dear Reader: You’ve introduced a topic of great importance to women of all ages: the fact that cardiovascular disease often takes a different form -- and comes with different symptoms -- in women than in men.
An example is coronary microvascular disease, which is the diagnosis you have received. Also referred to as small vessel disease, it occurs more frequently in women than in men. It’s also often seen in women in their 40s, and even 30s younger than is typically associated with heart disease.
The depiction of heart attacks in film and on TV, sometimes referred to as a “Hollywood heart attack,” are marked numbness in the left arm and sudden and severe chest pain. This occurs due to plaque formation, which partially or completely blocks blood flow in the large coronary arteries that wrap around the heart. But coronary microvascular disease, or MVD, involves the network of much smaller vessels that branch off from the larger arteries and reach deep into the tissues of the heart. This leads to a different array of symptoms.
