Tag : artery

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.

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.