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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:
Hello, everybody!
  Over
the last couple of months, we’ve proudly told you the stories of two
participants in the Track Your Plaque program who have successfully
dropped their heart scan scores by considerable amounts, 51% and 63%.
However, we need to keep in mind that these are our record holders.
Talking to some people, it appears that they’ve gotten the false
impression that you, too, must achieve numbers like this to succeed.
Not true. Success can be had on a more modest scale and you can still
lead a happy, healthy life, free of heart attack and heart procedures.
In this issue of the Scanner, we detail such a person, someone who
started the program, stuck to it, and simply stopped his score but
didn’t drop it, at least not by a large margin.
Is he a failure? Absolutely not. He is, in fact, a great success. Read
on to hear his story.
Because this issue is so important to understanding your results in the
program, we will also release a new Special Report in the near future
called The Track Your Plaque Five Stages of Success.
Track in health!
Dr. Davis
What constitutes success in the Track Your Plaque
program?
Tom’s heart scan score of 619 hit him like a lightning
bolt.
Just retired from his plumbing business at age 57, he felt on top of the
world. His heart scan score brought him back down to earth.
His doctor shrugged and handed him a prescription for a cholesterol drug
to him. “Do you want to see a cardiologist?”
That was the full extent of the interaction. Tom didn’t tell his doctor
that he had a real aversion to the cholesterol drugs and wished to avoid
using them. He was also unconvinced that he had received truly
insightful information sufficient to deal with an important issue.
In comes the Track Your Plaque program. Tom’s hidden patterns included a
severe small LDL pattern, intermediate-density lipoprotein, and severe
deficiency of vitamin D. We used fish oil, niacin, and vitamin D
supplementation to correct his patterns. We discussed how to use food
choices to dramatically correct his patterns. Tom promptly lost 37 lbs.
One year later, Tom’s repeat heart scan score: 615, somewhat less than a
1% drop from his previous score.
Dr. Davis:
Is Tom any better off than when he started? After all, he began with a
score of 619 and ended up almost no different at 615.
Is he simply at the same place he started?
Well, let’s take Tom’s results in perspective. If nothing had been done,
we’d expect a 30% per year increase. That is the natural rate of plaque
growth. This would have put Tom’s score at 805 after one year. If Tom
had simply followed his doctor’s advice and taken a statin drug and
followed a conventional diet, his plaque growth would likely have slowed
to about 20% per year, putting his score at 743 one year later.
Tom’s score stayed virtually the same. If we were permitted to take a
really close look inside Tom’s coronary atherosclerosis, we’d witness
several phenomena:
1) Tom’s arteries are more relaxed and less constricted (i.e., he has
normalized “endothelial function.” See our recent Special Report on
“.The Injured Endothelium: How it lays the groundwork for plaque
growth—And how to put a stop to it!”)
2) Inflammatory responses have subsided, inflammatory cells have exited
plaque, and other injurious factors are diminished or gone.
3) Fatty material (including “lipid pools”) have shrunk or disappeared.
Most of these observations come from studies involving intracoronary
ultrasound that require an imaging catheter to be threaded into a
coronary artery.
Should we persuade Tom to undergo an intracoronary ultrasound procedure
to get a closer look? Absolutely not. Tom is without symptoms and has a
normal stress test. There is simply no justification for invasive
procedures. But it is a safe assumption that the same phenomena have
occurred inside Tom’s arteries, given his lipoprotein responses on the
program.
We also know from our experience and that of others that no change in
heart scan score means a near-zero risk of heart attack. (Nobody is
truly at zero risk statistically. Even a healthy 20 year old, for
instance, carries a minimal amount of risk, but not zero risk.) You
might say that Tom has achieved plaque “inactivation.”
At the start of the program, Tom’s score put him in the 95th percentile
of heart scan scores for men his age. He carried a 5–10% per year risk
of heart attack. His risk is now reduced to near zero.
So Tom has actually had a big success. Although he hasn’t broken any
records (at least in the Track Your Plaque program), Tom has nonetheless
succeeded in reducing his risk for heart attack to near zero
.
Can cholesterol trump your heart scan?
Reprinted from The Heart Scan Blog
Lela's heart scan score: 449—very high for a 49-year old woman just
beginning her menopausal years. Her score placed her flat in the 99th
percentile, or the worst 1% of women her age.
Lela first consulted her primary care physician. She looked at the
result and seemed puzzled. "Now wait a minute. Your cholesterol numbers
have been great."
After a pause, Lela’s doctor declared the heart scan wrong. "Tests
aren't perfect. The heart scan is simply wrong. I'm going to believe the
cholesterol numbers and there's no way you have heart disease."
Is that right? Can cholesterol numbers trump your heart scan score? Can
the heart scan simply be wrong?
The answer is simple: NO.
The heart scan is NOT wrong. The heart scan is right. What is wrong with
this picture is that standard cholesterol testing commonly and
frequently fails to identify people at risk for heart disease and have
hidden coronary plaque.
What if this woman smoked when she was younger? That wouldn't be
revealed in her cholesterol panel. Or had high blood pressure, increased
inflammatory responses like C-reactive protein, small LDL particles or
lipoprotein(a), severe deficiency of vitamin D? NONE of that would be
revealed by cholesterol numbers.
So, no, the heart scan is not wrong. Nor are the cholesterol numbers
wrong. The doctor's interpretation of the data is wrong.
Please do not allow false reassurances offered by those who do not
understand the technology steer you wrong.
This woman proved to have an entire panel of hidden causes of her
coronary plaque uncovered. No surprise.
It’s the plaque, stupid!
Reprinted from The HeartHawk Blog.
I remember when I first met Dr. William Davis and we discussed the book
he was writing titled "Track Your Plaque." My first thought was, "What a
goofy name!" In retrospect, focusing on plaque and methods to track and
reverse it was brilliant.
The latest debate about relative risk ratios and antioxidants reminds me
about how traditional medicine relies on all manner of risk factors to
determine how to treat heart disease. However, risk deals only with what
might or could happen. Yes, if you have high LDL cholesterol, low HDL
cholesterol, or any number of other risk factors you might have heart
disease.
But, why live in the world of "maybe" when you could know exactly
whether you have heart disease, how serious it is, and whether what you
are doing is effective in treating it?! Get a heart scan and you will
know for certain. As Homer Simpson would say, "D'OH!"
The efficacy of heart scans is no longer in question. Recent studies,
statements by the AHA, the SHAPE guidelines all agree: heart scans are
the best predictor of heart attack.
Dr. Steven Nissen, Cleveland Clinic, has stated: "We now know that 95%
to 99% of the heart disease occurs at sites WITHOUT artery narrowing.
Thus, the old tests we perform to detect narrowing and blockages have
really misled us. We miss over 95% of the heart disease that causes
heart attacks."
Dr. Harvey Hecht, of The Heart and Vascular Institute in New York, has
said that "plaque imaging is ...not to be confused with risk factors,
which merely estimate a probability of developing atherosclerosis.
Rather, [plaque imaging] directly measures atherosclerosis, irrespective
of the presence or absence of risk factors; it provides the final common
denominator and is the most powerful predictor of cardiac events."
Regardless of cholesterol or the supplements you may or may not be
taking, settle the question. Get a heart scan and, if you have a
non-zero score, repeat it in a year to see if you are gaining or losing
ground. The plaque that is the root cause of heart disease can be
treated—but only if you know how much you have!
Plaque—it's not just for teeth anymore!
HeartHawk
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:
Endothelial Health: Why it's important and 9 ways to improve it
The endothelium is the single-celled layer lining the arteries of the
body. In fact, it’s the most extensive organ system in the human body.
It’s a fragile organ that injury transforms into a plaque-lined
landmine. Endothelial injury precedes real trouble by years. Here’s how
to recognize when you have it and nutritional supplements and health
strategies to help correct it.
Heart scans and radiation: The Real story
NEW FEATURE: Book Review - NO More Heart Disease
Copyright 2007, Track Your Plaque
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