Track Your Plaque is the revolutionary approach that shows you how heart scans and the latest medical and natural treatments can be combined to create the most powerful heart attack prevention program available!

In this issue:

• My score exploded on Lipitor®!
• Not all “heart scans” are heart scans
• “A new screening service is coming to my church in a couple of weeks. They say they screen for strokes, aneurysms, and heart disease. It only costs $99. Should I have this done?”

Track Your Plaque Members:

Participate in a live chat with Track Your Plaque author Dr. William Davis on Wednesday, May 17th at 9:00PM CDT.

My score exploded on Lipitor®!

Jim W. is a prominent, hard-driving corporate attorney. He felt that he had little time to dilly-dally around health issues. “Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it if it’s reasonable,” he declared.

Jim had a heart scan in 2004 when he was 54 years old. His score: 785, in the 90th percentile. Concerned, he sought out a cardiologist in town who he was told was “among the best”.

His cardiologist performed a nuclear stress test which proved normal. “Jim, you’re going to have to take Lipitor®.” He handed Jim a prescription for the drug.

Six weeks later, Jim could barely walk: his legs felt like rubber, he had trouble getting in and out of his car, stairs were nearly impossible. When he informed his doctor, he was advised to cut the dose back to 10 mg. This eased the pain and disability considerably, though not completely. “You’ve got to stay on the Lipitor®. There’s really no choice here,” his cardiologist warned. Jim accepted this, rationalizing that “no pain, no gain.”

By chance, he talked to a lawyer friend who told him about a coronary plaque control program that had helped him drop his heart scan score. That’s when Jim came to talk to us.

The first thing we did was repeat his heart scan, since his last scan was two years old. After all, long-term, we would need to know how successful the program was and we needed a starting point. Given his program thus far, we expected a substantial increase in score.

Jim’s score: 1130. Jim’s score had increased 20% per year since his first scan—while on Lipitor®.

Now we had Jim’s attention. We had Jim undergo lipoprotein testing to get a better handle on the causes of his plaque. No surprise, we identified several additional causes including a low HDL, a very severe small LDL pattern, excess IDL (an inability to clear dietary fats), inflammation, and nearly non-existent vitamin D blood level. We then devised a treatment program for Jim based on these patterns.

Editor’s note:

The conventional response to heart disease prevention is shockingly lame and ineffective. At the rate of plaque growth Jim was experiencing on Lipitor®, heart attack, stents, or bypass surgery was a certainty in the relatively near future. Granted, he may have done better had he been able to tolerate the initial dose prescribed, but our experience is that statin drugs like Lipitor® rarely achieve plaque regression by themselves.

Of course, the failure of Jim’s prevention program could mean a financial bonanza for his doctor and hospital. Stents, bypass surgery, and common add-on procedures like pacemakers and defibrillators, and you could easily tally up a $100,000 opportunity. Why bother with prevention?

You should bother because it’s your life. You simply can’t rely on many of the doctors and facilities around you, even “the best in town”. Arm yourself with good information. That’s where Track Your Plaque can help.

Not all “heart scans” are heart scans

64-slice CT scanners continue to be hot news in the popular press. Oprah even did another hour-long feature about them. Dr. Mehmet Oz again gushed over the sexiness of this “new” test.

Are 64-slice CT scanners the final answer in the conquest of heart disease?

Don't count on it. If heart scans, 64-slice or otherwise, are used for heart disease prevention, that is indeed a wonderful trend.

Unfortunately, these wonderful devices will be used by many friendly neighborhood hospitals for their own purposes: to detect unrecognized heart disease that leads to “downstream” hospital procedures. The test they’re interested in is not a simple heart scan, but a CT coronary angiogram. This test requires x-ray dye to be injected, unlike a simple heart scan performed without x-ray dye. But it’s the CT angiogram that reveals the percent blockage of your plaque. If someone has a 60% blockage, it's a powerful incentive for that person to undergo a conventional cardiac catheterization, stent, or bypass operation—whether or not it's needed.

Tragically, these devices are capable of performing simple heart scans, too. The heart scan is really the test that should be gaining all the publicity. It's not as glamorous, nor does it make much money for hospitals. That's because it's a tool for heart disease prevention.

Why would your hospital want to prevent heart disease? If a bypass operation yields $75,000 in revenues, why promote a heart scan for $100-500?

Before you undergo a 64-slice CT angiogram, consider this:

• The radiation exposure of a CT coronary angiogram is substantial, nearly as much as a conventional heart catheterization. It is therefore not a screening test. It is a diagnostic test that should be pursued only when you and your doctor have a specific question in mind but wish to avoid conventional catheterization (e.g., an equivocal stress test with atypical symptoms).
• Despite its high-tech precision, CT coronary angiography is non-quantitative. For instance, you’ll be told you might have a 30% blockage in the left anterior descending artery. This is useful information for long-term prevention. But how will you reassess this in 1, 2, 3 or more years from now? And how can you compare it with the initial test? The radiation exposure of this test is too high to perform this test over and over again. If you’ve read Track Your Plaque, you also know that measures of diameter (e.g., 30%) are flawed because the artery increases in diameter as plaque grows.
• Cost—Generally running $1800–4000, CT angiograms are not cheap.

In our view, what people should really be getting is a plain CT heart scan, not a CT coronary angiogram. The heart scan can be repeated over and over if needed to assess progression or regression (score reduction), uses far less radiation, and it’s a measure of the lengthwise extent of plaque.

CT heart scans are therefore the basis for the Track Your Plaque program. CT coronary angiograms are a useful, high-tech diagnostic test, but they should not be used as a screening test with today’s level of technology.

Perhaps, as technology evolves, the CT scanner of the future will obtain all the information we need―lengthwise quantification of plaque, analysis of plaque composition, percent blockage, etc., and with minimal radiation. Or, perhaps an alternative technology like MRI will accomplish this for us. Until then, we still advocate the simple CT heart scan as the world’s #1 way to detect hidden heart disease.

Heart scans—simple CT heart scans, without dye, low radiation, and relatively low-cost—are a tremendously underused and simple test that should be used more broadly in the U.S., just like mammograms are recommended for women to detect breast cancer.

A new screening service is coming to my church in a couple of weeks. They say they screen for strokes, aneurysms, and heart disease. It only costs $99. Should I have this done?

Our experiences with these screening services have been, for the most part, quite positive. For a nominal price, you can be screened for these diseases with a painless, quick, and reliable process, generally ultrasound-based.

These services generally provide:

• Carotid ultrasound—to identify atherosclerotic plaque or blockage in the carotid arteries.
• Abdominal aortic ultrasound—to identify abdominal aortic aneurysm
• Ankle-brachial index or leg ultrasound—to identify atherosclerotic disease of the pelvis or leg arteries
• Bone density assessment for osteoporosis<

The real deal here is the carotid ultrasound. Most insurance companies will not pay for screening carotid ultrasound and so these screening services are a great way to find out whether carotid plaque is present to any degree. However, if you do prove to have significant plaque, you may still need a “real” diagnostic study in which more images and information are obtained.

The carotid ultrasound can serve as an indirect method to uncover potential hidden coronary plaque, as well. Even though it’s the neck’s carotid arteries that are imaged, if plaque is discovered here (to any degree), it’s very likely that you have hidden coronary plaque as well (though you won’t know just how much). Thus, having carotid plaque can alert you to the possibility of coronary plaque. (Does having no carotid plaque mean you also have no coronary plaque? No, it does not. This is where a heart scan is best.)

The abdominal ultrasound to uncover hidden aneurysm is only rarely helpful but can be a lifesaver if you were (are) a smoker and are over 50 years old.

Looking for artery blockages in the pelvis and legs is also usually helpful only in smokers, long-standing diabetics, or in people with leg or thigh cramps when you walk (“claudication”).

Ultrasound diagnosis for osteoporosis is not the ideal method for measuring this disease but is reasonable given its ease and low-cost. It’s one of those tests in which if it proves abnormal, the result is helpful and should be discussed with your doctor. If it’s normal, you’re probably okay.

Given the value of the combination of tests which, if performed by a hospital, would easily cost several thousand dollars, we encourage our patients to have these services performed when available. Occasionally, important findings are uncovered that are truly helpful, sometimes lifesaving. In our experience, contrary to the conversation in the popular press, rarely are so-called “false positives” generated in which an abnormality is uncovered that is not really there but an artifact of testing. We have yet to encounter a person undergoing these screening services who has regretted doing so.

Not a Track Your Plaque member yet? The price for initial 3-month membership is going up to $39.95 in May, 2006. Enroll now to become a member at the old price of $29.95. Click here or go to http://www.trackyourplaque.com/fo03-00benefits.asp.

New on the Member website in May 2006:

Myth Busters: The Women and Heart Disease controversy—What’s the real story?

The popular press has made a lot of fuss lately about the inequities in diagnosing heart disease symptoms in females. Symptoms of active heart disease and heart attack in women are often vague or non-specific, and too many people and their doctors regard heart disease as a man’s disease.

How does heart scanning and Track Your Plaque fit into this conversation? We provide the answers that help settle the controversy.

Chat time with Track Your Plaque author and cardiologist, Dr. William Davis

Chat with Dr. William Davis, author of Track Your Plaque and heart disease reversal expert, on Wednesday, May 17th at 9 pm to 10 pm (Central time). Members simply log on to the www.trackyourplaque.com website and go to the Chat room.

Magnesium: Water to the rescue!

In our last report on water (Your water may be killing you!) we talked about how tap and bottled water are miserably deficient in healthy minerals, especially magnesium, resulting in a worldwide epidemic of magnesium deficiency. Learn how choosing the right waters to drink can help restore healthy magnesium levels.

Copyright 2006, Track Your Plaque