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New Discoveries About Heart Attack
Cholesterol makes you blind! Cholesterol won’t, of course, literally make you go blind. But as an indicator of hidden heart disease, it can leave you in the dark. Can you have a heart attack with low cholesterol? Sure can. Can you drop dead of a “normal” cholesterol? It’s an everyday phenomenon. (1,152 times per day nationwide, to be exact, according to the American Heart Association.) Can you survive to age 95, outlive all your neighbors and never have a heart attack with high cholesterol? Absolutely. There are better ways! Coronary imaging technology is advancing at breakneck speed. Today, we can have our coronary arteries imaged in 30 seconds and find out with 98% confidence if we have silent heart disease. Cholesterol can be 92 or 192, it makes little difference. The hospital with the most bypass surgeries wins! We live in an age when hospitals measure success by the number of coronary bypass surgeries they perform. Incredibly, it is still easier to get a bypass operation than it is to get good information on heart disease prevention. There are even billboards on the highways advertising bypass surgery. Cardiac care is big business. As a nation, we spend $59 billion on cardiovascular care per year (American Heart Association, 2002). Annual hospital revenues for bypass surgery total $25 billion. Thirty percent of hospital revenues and 50% of profits are from cardiac care. Heart care to a hospital is like the Accord is to Honda, or Windows is to Microsoft—it’s a hot seller. Heart attack is the failure of prevention Times are changing. We should reject the notion that heart disease unpredictably results in dangerous events treated with hospital procedures. We should think of every heart attack, every angioplasty, every bypass surgery as a failure to identify potential catastrophe. If heart disease requires decades to develop and if methods to detect it are already available, can’t we terminate the process years before trouble starts? Isn’t it better to prevent a fire than to struggle to extinguish a blaze once it’s enveloping your house? The same holds true for your heart.  Who cares if you have “silent” plaque?If you have plaque in your arteries undetected by stress testing, so what? Is there any danger from ‘silent plaque? You bet there is. Study after study through the 1980s and 1990s demonstrated that—much to the surprise of cardiologists—the majority (>70%) of heart attacks originate from “mild” blockages of 20–50%. These plaques don’t block blood flow and don’t cause symptoms. They would not be ballooned, stented, or bypassed. Yet “mild” plaques pose the greatest risk and are undetectable by stress testing. Having plaque is bad enough! Having any quantity of plaque in your coronary arteries is sufficient reason to be concerned that heart attack might be in your future. Keep in mind that, once plaque is established, it grows—and it grows rapidly. We used to believe that plaque growth was a slow phenomenon requiring years for significant worsening. But new studies applying heart scans to track plaque show frightening rates of growth of 30% per year. The volume of plaque in your arteries can easily double in a year. Heart disease “regression” is not new The concept of regressing, or shrinking, coronary plaque is not new. For years, people have wondered whether plaque can be shrunk. Earlier efforts at plaque regression date back to the 1970s when techniques for measurement of plaque and treatment were primitive. Back then, clinical trials like those conducted by Dr. Blankenhorn at the University of Southern California, required coronary angiograms (obtained via heart catheterization) to assess the extent of plaque. The treatments included medicines no longer in use. Remarkably, some patients did obtain some regression of their plaque. But these efforts lacked two crucial ingredients: Precise methods to measure plaque and effective methods to control it. The results that are now possible are far superior to early efforts because we now have the ability to precisely measure and track plaque, and the “tools” to reduce plaque are more effective—and they’re getting better every day. That’s where the Track Your Plaque program comes in. Click Here to Start Tracking Your Plaque |
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