SCIENCE / MEDICINE : Chest Pains Termed Treatable

Tens of thousands of American women diagnosed each year with chest pain and no signs of heart disease may be suffering from a treatable disorder of the small arteries, a researcher said last week.

Many of these women, who often experience intense pain, are being treated for psychiatric disorders because no physical symptoms can be found with conventional tests, said Dr. Richard Cannon of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Md.

His studies have shown that many of the patients are suffering from a disorder he calls microvascular angina, in which blood flow may be blocked in very tiny arteries that nourish the heart. A variety of treatments exist to relieve the pain, Cannon said, including many of the standard heart drugs.

Although microvascular angina is not a psychiatric condition, some psychiatric drugs also appear to relieve the chest pain, perhaps because they alleviate a disorder in the nervous system’s regulation of certain muscles.

His current hypothesis is that the condition may be the result of improper signals being sent from the body to the brain, or a problem in the brain’s analysis of those signals.