Track Your Plaque shows how to use CT heart scans as the 1st step in a proven program to slow, stop, even REVERSE heart disease!

In this issue:

• Another Track Your Plaque success story: 45% drop in heart scan score!
  Lee’s story began at age 38, when he had his first heart scan. Score: 14 - low, but very concerning at this young age. Though Lee didn’t understand the full implications of his heart scan score, he knew that something was not right. After all, his father had his first heart attack at age 60..
• Hard plaque, soft plaque: What do they mean?
  "My doctor said that heart scans are worthless because they only measure calcium. He says that calcium only tells you if there's hard plaque, and that hard plaque is stable. He says that calcium won't tell you anything about soft plaque, and soft plaque is what really that causes heart attack..
• Bait and switch
  Among the most common bait-and-switch heart scams: Your cholesterol is high. The sequence of subsequent testing is well-rehearsed. “Gee, Bob, I’m worried about your risk for heart disease. Let’s schedule you for a nuclear stress test.” (Reprinted from The Heart Scan Blog)

Hello, Plaque-Trackers!

Ten years ago, hardly anybody talked about heart scans.

Stress testing was the test of the era for detecting heart disease, a test that prompted heart catheterization after heart catheterization, a great many─millions─of them entirely unnecessary. But it yielded a bonanza of procedures for hospitals and cardiologists.

Fast forward to 2008, and heart scans are more widely talked about. I subscribe to a (free) Google search service that provides daily links to any mention of search terms you specify. (You can do this too by accessing Google News RSS feeds.)

But bad information on what heart scans mean, how they can or should modify a program of heart disease prevention still dominates the conversation. Getting good information in this arena remains a struggle.

Any mention of reducing your heart scan score? That conversation has yet to make it to the mainstream media, despite the fact that we do it all the time.

In this issue of the Track Your Plaque Newsletter, we talk about yet another success story, as well as some of the mis-information that continues to obscure the truth.

Track in health!


Dr. Davis

Another Track Your Plaque Success Story: 45% drop in heart scan score!

Lee got his share of mis-information before he stumbled onto the Track Your Plaque program.

Lee’s story began at age 38, when he had his first heart scan. Score: 14 - low, but very concerning at this young age. Though Lee didn’t understand the full implications of his heart scan score, he knew that something was not right. After all, his father had his first heart attack at age 60.

Lee made modest efforts at a low-fat diet, weight loss, and exercise, followed by a second heart scan score 5 years later. Score: 87, reflecting an alarming rate of increase. That’s when he sought “professional” help.

The cardiologist was a no-nonsense kind of guy. He advised a nuclear stress test immediately. Lee achieved a high level of exercise on the test, had no symptoms like chest pain or unusual breathlessness, and the EKG was entirely normal. So far, so good.

But the cardiologist then advised Lee that the nuclear images of heart blood flow were unclear and that there might be a severe blockage serving the bottom of the heart. “For all we know, you could be sitting on a time bomb. We need to clear this up” Lee was told.

A heart catheterization followed. “All clear!” the doctor declared when all he discovered was some mild plaque in the left anterior descending (corresponding to the location of plaque by the heart scans). He discharged Lee from the hospital with a prescription for Lipitor® and an appointment to visit with the hospital dietitian for advice on a “cardiac diet.”

Lee did was he as advised. Anxious to know whether his program was working, he underwent yet another heart scan just 9 months later. Score: 108.

Exasperated, Lee finally found the Track Your Plaque program. As we often do, we uncovered several previously unidentified sources of plaque growth, including small LDL and severe deficiency of vitamin D.

We showed Lee how to use nutrition and nutritional supplements to correct his abnormalities (along with 18 lbs of weight loss with the Track Your Plaque diet). Another heart scan score one year after the last showed a score of 59, a 45% reduction.


Dr. Davis:

Lee started this journey at an unusually young age. Even though his heart scan score was low, it virtually guaranteed a future of heart disease, heart attack, hospital procedures as early as his mid- to late-40s without preventive action.

Following the conventional path - statin drug, “cardiac diet“ - is a path of failure. The progression of Lee’s heart scan scores bears this out. It’s also a path followed by all the unhappy people who fill hospital beds subjected to procedure after procedure, year after year, never being told that better methods to control their disease are available that could spare them this endless revolving door.

Now, Lee just needs to keep up his program of success for the next . . . 50 years!


(Track Your Plaque Members: We will detail Lee’s entire program in an upcoming in-depth Success Story on the www.trackyourplaque.com website.)
 

Hard plaque, soft plaque: What do they mean?

"My doctor said that heart scans are worthless because they only measure calcium. He says that calcium only tells you if there's hard plaque, and that hard plaque is stable. He says that calcium won't tell you anything about soft plaque, and soft plaque is what really that causes heart attack."

Is that true? Does the calcium detected on a heart scan only a reflection of "hard" plaque? Is hard plaque also more stable, less prone to rupture and cause heart attack?

Let’s go back to the original study that provided the basis for heart scans, performed by heart scan pioneer, Dr. John Rumberger. In his now-famous study, Dr. Rumberger studied the coronary arteries of people who had died. He found that, by examining arteries cut into dozens of cross-sections, calcium comprised 20% of the volume of total plaque. This held true in men and women, young and old.

This simple phenomenon led Dr. Rumberger to surmise that if calcium could be measured precisely, total coronary plaque volume could also be measured, since each cubic millimiter of calcium represented five (20%) cubic millimiters of total atherosclerotic plaque.

Calcium is therefore a means of measuring total plaque, both soft and hard. Within plaque, there may be areas that are soft (e.g., "lipid pools"). There are also areas made of calcium, either scattered about like “pebbles” or collections like bigger “rocks.” There’s also a variety of other elements, such as inflammatory cells, debris, structural tissues, etc.

When we perform intracoronary ultrasound by passing an ultrasound probe directly into a person’s coronary artery, that’s exactly what we see: a blend of hard elements and soft elements, all mixed together in varying degrees along the length of arteries.

Most atherosclerotic plaque, therefore, is a mixture of materials, soft, hard, and in-between. Configurations, length, surface characteristics, thickness can all vary from artery to artery, person to person.

Can an artery or plaque be "soft" or "hard"?

The great majority of the time, it's both. Artery composition varies millimeter by millimeter, having more soft elements in one segment, more hard elements in another. The artery can also change over time: "soft" plaque may indeed be soft today, only to be "hard" in 6 months, and vice versa.

What a CT heart scan does is provide a gauge of total plaque, soft and hard, and it does so easily, safely, precisely. If your score increases, the lengthwise volume of total plaque has also grown. If your score decreases, the total amount of plaque has also decreased.

In people without symptoms, a heart scan score of zero - no detectable plaque - means a heart attack risk that is very low. (Statistically, nobody has a zero risk.) Progressively increasing scores mean greater and greater risk.

Rarely does heart attack result in a person who has no symptoms with a heart scan score of zero, but it can happen. (I have never seen it happen in thousands of patients.) For this reason, it is still of value to address all the potential causes of plaque in a person with a zero score.

Heart scans are not perfect, but they’re pretty darn good. In fact, as a screening test, heart scans are the best we’ve got: easy, inexpensive (compared to other health tests), safe, and accurate, meeting all the basic requirements of a screening test like mammograms, screening for hidden blood in the stool for color cancer, and Pap smears. But, unlike other forms of screening tests, heart scans are also quantitative - they yield a number that can be tracked over time
 

Bait and switch

(Reprinted from The Heart Scan Blog)

Relevant to Lee’s story (above), we reprint a Heart Scan Blog post of how many people are led down a false path of profit that yields procedures, not health insights.

"When banks compete, you win.”

The TV ad opens with a 60-something man sitting in his living room, talking to a three-piece suit-clad, 30-something banker.

The older man is explaining to the dismayed younger man why he’s going to use Lending Tree loan service for a home loan.

“But Dad, I’m you’re son!” the younger whines.

Many of Lending Tree’s clients have collaborated in filing a multi-million dollar class action suit against the company, claiming “bait and switch” tactics. They claim that homebuyers are lured by low interest rates or low closing costs on a home loan. Once the buyer concludes the hassle of filling out numerous forms, the suit accuses Lending Tree of making a switch to a costlier loan.

Bait and switch is among the oldest con games around. If you’ve ever bought a car from a car dealer, chances are you’ve had your own little brush with this deception. The ad promises the SUV you’ve wanted for only $299 per month. Only, once you get there, the salesman informs you that only a limited number of special deals were available and they’ve run out. But he’s still got a really good deal right over here!

Most of us recognize that we’ve been hoodwinked. Yet we still go along and buy a car from the dealer.

What if it’s not a sleazy salesman behind the pitch, but a doctor. If it’s hard to resist the sales pitch at the car dealership, it can be near impossible to ignore the advice of your doctor. But the truth is often loud and clear: in many instances, it is a genuine, bona fide, and fully-certified scam.

Among the most common bait-and-switch heart scams: Your cholesterol is high. The sequence of subsequent testing is well-rehearsed. “Gee, Bob, I’m worried about your risk for heart disease. Let’s schedule you for a nuclear stress test.”

The stress test, like 20% or more of them, is “falsely positive,” meaning abnormal even though there’s nothing wrong with you. Another 30% are equivocal, not clearly abnormal but also not clearly normal. Now up to 50% of people tested “need” a heart catheterization in the hospital to clarify this frightening uncertainty. You might end up with a stent or two, even bypass surgery. Your simple $20 cholesterol panel has metamorphosed into $100,000 in hospital procedures.

That familiar sequence is followed thousands of times, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

Be forewarned: Better arm yourself with better information before you get trapped in this scam.

Interested in becoming a Track Your Plaque Member?

If you’re interested in finding out more about becoming a Member of Track Your Plaque, go to the Track Your Plaque Member Benefits page. See why more and more people are finding out that there are alternatives to the conventional answers (or lack of answers!) for heart disease.

Track Your Plaque Members

Watch for our new and upcoming Special Reports on:

Track Your Plaque WEBINAR on Small LDL: The number one cause of coronary plaque
Dr. Davis will repeat this popular webinar that covers the evidence behind and importance of Vitamin D in your plaque control program.  Register today!

Copyright 2008, Track Your Plaque