Improvement of coronary microvascular dysfunction. Coronary microvascular dysfunction has been demonstrated to affect the prognosis of patients with acute coronary syndromes: Furber et al described that Doppler flow velocity parameters in the infarct-related artery are of prognostic value for long-term cardiac events. Additionally, Takahashi et al. found an impaired coronary flow reserve velocity (CFVR) in the infarct-related artery to be significantly associated with increased cardiac event rates at long-term follow-up. Furthermore, microvascular function has been demonstrated to be altered even in non-ischemic regions at distance from the infarcted myocardial tissue and van de Hoef et al. have recently shown that microvascular dysfunction determined in the reference vessel after percutaneous coronary intervention is associated with a significantly increased long-term cardiac mortality.