d to put it there to prevent childhood rickets. Otherwise, the only substantial food source of vitamin D is in oily fish like salmon and then only a modest quantity.
Vitamin D is cholecalciferol, a hormone. Deficiencies of hormones can have catastrophic consequences. Imagine that every winter your thyroid gland shuts down and produced no thyroid hormone. You'd get very ill, gain 30 lbs, lose your hair, feel awful.
That's what happens when you're sun deprived and thereby deficient in cholecalciferol--you're deficient in a hormone. And it happens to most of us every year for many months.
I continue to witness spectacular effects by bringing 25-OH-vitamin D3 blood levels to 50 ng/ml with supplementation, including an apparent surge in success dropping heart scan scores.
Heart disease reversal is nothing new in my office. However, I have to admit that it's not something that generally happens each and every day.
As our approach is refined, we are witnessing an unprecedented frequency of plaque reversal. Since Monday (today is Tuesday), I've seen four people who have regressed their coronary plaque and dropped their heart scan score.
Pat was the most recent addition to this list. At age 53, I was honestly surprised at the ease of dropping her heart scan score from 128 to 42 in the space of a year. I was surprised because among her lipoprotein patterns was the dreaded combination of lipoprotein(a) and small LDL, probably the most aggressive risk for heart disease I know of and also among the most difficult to gain control over. She also suffered a deep personal tragedy in her family, an emotional convulsion that can sometimes wipe out any hope of plaque reversal.
I'm hopeful that this virtual epidemic of heart disease reversal continues. And I hope that you participate in it.
At first, Joe felt disappointed, defeated, and frightened. After his heart scan, a radiologist at the center told him that his score of 264 was moderately high. He told Joe that he was at moderate risk for heart attack and that a nuclear stress test was going to be required.
This left Joe feeling confused. After all he'd had a heart scan 18 months earlier and his score was 278, 5% higher.
I reassured Joe that the radiologist had not been aware that Joe had a prior heart scan. The radiologist didn't know that Joe's heart scan score had actually been reduced.
In fact, Joe's risk for heart attack was not moderate--it is now very low, since his score was 5% lower. While growing plaque is active plaque, shrinking plaque is inactive plaque and thereby at far less risk for heart attack.
I wrote about this phemonenon in a previous Blog: When is a heart scan score of 400 better than 200? at http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/2006_09_01_archive.html. When you've had more than one scan, the risk for heart attack suggested by the score takes a back seat to the rate of change of your score. In other words, even though Joe's score of 264 represented a moderate risk (of approximately 3% per year, roughly 30% over 10 years), this no longer held true, since it actually represented a 5% decrease over a previous score.
Joe's risk for heart attack is probably close to zero. ALWAYS view your second (or any subsequent) heart scan score in the context of your previous score, not in isolation.
Track Your Plaque newsletter subscribers: We will detail more of Joe's story in the coming January 2007 newsletter. If you'd like to read or subscribe to the newsletter, go to http://www.cureality.com/f_scanshow.asp.
Despite the controversy over drug-coated stents, I maintain that the best stent is no stent at all.
Yes, there are indeed times when such things are necessary, but not with the frequency that they are implanted nowadays.
Another reason why stents are an undesirable phenemenon is that they muck up your heart scan. Take a look:
The long white object in the center is a stent in the left anterior descending artery of this 60 year old man. Just beyond the stent (at about 1 o'clock from the stent) is a plaque that could be scored. However, you can see that, with the presence of the stent, the bulk of this artery is no longer "scorable". If this man wishes to "track his plaque", he will have to be content with tracking only the circumflex and right coronary arteries, the other two arteries without stents.
The stainless steel or similar metallic materials of current stents simply prevent us from seeing through them for plaque scoring purposes. It's best if you can simply avoid getting one for this and other reasons.
Track Your Plaque Members: Watch for the upcoming editorial by our Heart Hawk on drug-eluting stents.
