February 2025

If you receive a heart disease diagnosis, your doctor may recommend lifestyle changes to reduce heart disease risk factors and improve your heart health. But you may also need to take one or more medications for your heart health.

Managing heart disease can feel overwhelming at first. Here’s how you can get a handle on your treatment.

Understand how your medication works

Different heart medications do different things. Common medications you may need include the following:

Blood-thinning medications

These medications help prevent too much blood clotting, which can increase your risk of stroke. They’re also often used to manage atrial fibrillation or irregular heart rhythm problems.

Common blood thinning medications for heart health include aspirin, warfarin, and several direct oral anticoagulants (DOACs).

These medications can make it more difficult to stop bleeding if you get a cut or skin wound. If you need surgery, you should let your doctor know you’re on a blood thinner. If you take warfarin, you may need to have your blood levels checked regularly to make sure the medicine is working as it should.

Blood pressure medications

High blood pressure, or hypertension, is a risk factor for heart disease and stroke.

The Food and Drug Administration has approved dozens of medications to lower and control high blood pressure. Your doctor will prescribe the one that works best for your heart health and medical history.

Your doctor may also want you to monitor your blood pressure at home to see how well your medication and lifestyle changes are working to lower your blood pressure.

Cholesterol medications

High cholesterol can cause buildup of plaque in your arteries, a major risk factor for coronary heart disease, heart attack, and stroke.

Cholesterol-lowering medications include statins, bile acid sequestrates, prescription niacin, and fibrates. People with familial hypercholesterolemia, a genetic condition that causes very high LDL cholesterol levels, are often prescribed an injectable medicine to lower their cholesterol.

Take your medication as directed

Medication adherence — taking your medication as prescribed — can make a big difference in how well your treatment works. Yet all too often, people don’t follow doctor’s orders and make mistakes when taking their medication.

Here are some basic rules of medication adherence you should follow:

Read the medication pamphlet

This tells you when and how often you should take your medication. It will also tell you whether you need to take it on an empty stomach or with food. Medication pamphlets also list common side effects and what to do if you experience rare, serious side effects.

Stick to your medication schedule

Ask your doctor when you should take your medication and stick to that schedule as closely as possible. If it’s up to you, divide 24 hours by the number of doses you need to take. For example, if you need to take your medicine twice a day, you would take one dose every 12 hours. Or if you need to take it three times a day, you would take one dose every eight hours.

Decide at what times you will take the medication every day and then set recurring medication reminders on your smartphone or calendar.

Taking doses too close together or too far apart can increase your risk of side effects. If you accidentally miss a dose, don’t double up. Just take the next dose at the next scheduled time.

Don’t split pills without your doctor’s okay

Some people use pill splitting to save on medication costs. If cost is an issue, ask your pharmacist if your medication comes in a generic version that costs less.

Not all pills can be cleanly split in half unless they have a score line. If you split a pill without a score line, you may not get the right amount of your medication. If a tablet is FDA approved to be split, that information should be on the prescription labeling.

If your doctor gives the okay to split your pills, ask your pharmacist if your pills have a score line or if they can get them from a manufacturer that makes your medication with a score line.

Talk to your pharmacist

Before you take any medication, whether it’s a new prescription or a refill, it’s good to review it with your pharmacist. They can answer any questions about your medications. They can also review common side effects and recommend ways to manage them.