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Tag : heart-disease : Page 2
The Simple Truth About Cardiac Risk
Thanks to modern medical advances, there are an almost unlimited number of tests doctors can administer to determine who is at the greatest risk of heart attacks, strokes and dementia. Take the simple cholesterol test, for example: today we doctors can subdivide your cholesterol into seven or eight or even nine smaller subtypes and analyze your risk of cardiovascular disease, even if you appear to have “low” or “normal” cholesterol. Physicians today can administer a battery of expensive tests for just about everything.
What does ‘antiaging’ really mean?
Would someone define “antiaging,” please?
One of the difficulties inherent in running Longevity Medical Clinic is that I never know exactly how to describe my practice. I don't particularly like the term “antiaging” because I'm not exactly sure what it means. Obviously we all connect emotionally with the idea of looking, feeling and functioning as though we were younger than we are – it’s a compelling thought, one that has been around for centuries. But the obvious reality is that we can’t truly reverse our age: that, as any sci-fi fan knows, involves warping space and time, and somehow shifting us to an earlier point in the space-time continuum. While the quantum physics folks tell us that subatomic particles do this on a regular basis, I'm somewhat at a loss as to how to do it with an intact human being.
Cholesterol & Heart Disease Part 3
Is their higher level of testosterone the reason men have an increased risk of heart disease compared to women? For many years doctors have thought so. This belief seems to have grown largely out of the fact that women generally tend to have lower risk of cardiovascular disease than men (at least until after menopause). Because estrogen has a significant anti-inflammatory effect in the blood vessels, and because we think of testosterone as the opposite of estrogen, for a long time the medical community presumed that testosterone must increase the inflammation that can lead to heart disease.
We now know that, like estrogen, testosterone also has a potent anti-inflammatory effect in the arteries. Testosterone isn’t part of the problem – but it can be part of the solution.
Cholesterol & Heart Disease Part 2
In our last blog we talked about Cholesterol and Heart Disease. We discussed how the dangerous build-up of plaque is a result of low-density lipoprotein, or LDL cholesterol, becoming damaged or oxidized in the bloodstream. The body treats this oxidized LDL as a threat, and sends white blood cells to attack the cholesterol. In order to reduce the threat of heart disease, we have to prevent plaque from forming. There are three major ways to accomplish this.
The first way to reduce plaque build-up is to reduce the amount of LDL cholesterol available to be oxidized in the first place. Reducing cholesterol is the focus of most of our traditional efforts at preventing heart disease. Cholesterol reduction is the primary reason so many millions are on statin drugs like Lipitor.
Cholesterol & Heart Disease Part 1
We all want to live long, happy and healthy lives – and taking care of our hearts is an essential part of good health and longevity. In this blog I want to tell you a bit about cholesterol and how this complex substance relates to heart disease. In an upcoming blog we’ll look at how to prevent the build-up of the wrong kinds of cholesterol so that we can maintain or restore good heart health.
There was a time when doctors thought of cholesterol as a single compound. We now know that cholesterol actually comes in a wide variety of sizes and shapes, and the names we give to these types are based on their density. The lightest and most buoyant cholesterol is now classed as “very low density lipoprotein” or VLDL. For a variety of reasons, VLDL is the most problematic form of cholesterol you can have in your bloodstream. The second common form of cholesterol is abbreviated “LDL,” which stands for low-density lipoprotein. This form of cholesterol is the most