A couple of weeks ago my cardiologist offered to rx nitroglycerin tabs (0.4 mg sublingual) to help diagnose whether my symptoms are due to ischemia or not. I've used them twice now and am having trouble deciding whether they really helped. What I mean is, my symptoms always go away eventually so how can I tell whether it was the nitro that helped relieve them? The first time was during the afternoon last week when I was having a squeezing heaviness in the center of my chest. The nitro made my heart pound and moved the center of the heaviness upward toward my throat, and gave me a throbbing headache. After a half hour I finally fell asleep, and when I woke up an hour later, the chest heaviness was gone but the headache was still there. Today I was feeling a chest congestion and burning all day, which this evening turned into a twisting feeling on the left side of my chest and neck. I took one nitro, got the same throbbing and pounding in my chest, neck, and head, but the tightness didn't begin to go away for another 20 minutes. At that point I took a xanax 0.25 mg and the pressure was more or less gone about 30 minutes after that.
So I'm wondering what others who have used nitro have experienced? Do your angina symptoms subside within a couple of minutes (that's when I feel the throbbing/pounding), or does anyone else get relief 20 minutes or more later like this? Everything I've read says it should give relief right away if at all, but I trust other people's experience over the word of "experts" in things like this.