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: Stopping a charging locomotive!
  Starting with a heart scan score of a whopping 3161, could Tim hope to put a stop to his risk for heart disease?
• Are you a wheat-aholic?
  Leslie was helplessly addicted to wheat products, foods that contributed to a high heart scan score. Eliminating wheat products from her diet yielded huge effects on her lipoprotein patterns—and she lost 30 lbs.
• Heart scans: Mammograms of the heart
  For years, doctors and patients didn’t understand how mammograms fit into breast cancer detection. Now, 47 years later, mammograms are widely accepted and standard practice. Heart scans and mammograms share many parallels in their two different worlds.

Hello, everybody!

I sense change in the air.

Sitting in the lobby of a hotel I stayed at recently, an ad for a cholesterol drug came on. The bartender looked up, laughed, then promptly changed the channel. “Haven’t we had enough?” he remarked.

Even hospital TV ads seem tired and overdone.

The COURAGE Trial has cast doubt on the idea that stents are always good for us. Drug industry direct-to-consumer advertising has supersaturated us with their aggressive marketing tactics, but backfiring by openly displaying their raw, profiteering ways.

The internet, the nutritional supplement industry, and the developing economic crisis in health care are all causing people to ask some tough questions of the conventional answers to health care and heart disease.

We say it’s about time. If you haven’t already noticed, your friendly neighborhood hospital is more than willing to open their arms to you—oh yes, that will be $40,000, please. Heart scans—you mean to prevent heart disease? Why bother when you have the bright shiny facilities of your hospital to bail you out when catastrophe strikes?

Of course, the Track Your Plaque program is all about prevention—early detection, followed by a rational, effective approach to put coronary atherosclerotic plaque to a stop. And, yes, reversal of heart disease is indeed possible!

Track in health!
 

Dr. Davis
 

Another Track Your Plaque Success Story: Stopping a charging locomotive!

Tim was accustomed to crises.

As director of counseling in a youth crisis center, his daily life was a series of crises of one sort or another. The teenagers who came to his center did so because of serious behavioral difficulties, near-misses with the law (often multiple times), and unmanageability at home. Sometimes, these kids had a parent or parents who simply didn’t care.

Arguments, shouting, fights, crying were all part of a day’s work for Tim.

So, when at age 54, Tim learned of his heart scan score of 3161, obviously in the 99th percentile, he sat back and thought about this finding, reflected on his life and what effect this was going to have. He then called us.

At first, most people (usually men) who receive scores in the thousands become nervous wrecks in short order. But not Tim. In fact, I was impressed with his calm, philosophical approach to the entire issue of heart disease. The only time I saw Tim express visible relief was when we performed a stress test, which carried a 50% chance of being abnormal, given his high score. When I told Jim it was entirely normal—meaning normal blood flow through his coronary arteries, despite the amount of plaque lining the artery walls—he did heave a sigh of relief.

But, beyond that, you could never tell that it bothered him having such a high score. We of course set out to 1) identify why Tim had such a high score in the first place, then 2) corrected all the causes. Not surprisingly, Tim had nearly every cause in the book: low HDL, small LDL, increased intermediate-density lipoprotein, high triglycerides and VLDL, lipoprotein(a), deficiency of vitamin D (severe). Despite a daily exercise routine, Tim struggled with weight loss, losing only 12 lbs off his 6 ft 1 inch, 262 lb frame.

Sixteen months later, another heart scan: score 3132, about a 1% drop.

When I gave Tim the good news, he smiled. “Thanks, doc. I really appreciate it. Time to get back to the kids.”

So it went with Tim, a man who faced crisis every day but deals with it. I hope he has the same success with the troubled kids.



Dr. Davis:

No new record-setting drops in score here. But, beginning with such a high score, it is more difficult to achieve the large percentile drops of some of our greatest successes, dropping 30, 50, or 60%.

Nonetheless, Tim stopped this 100-ton charging locomotive. I do believe that, in effect, coronary plaque can build up “momentum” in growth: the higher the heart scan score, the greater the burden of plaque, the slower it stops growing. In fact, I would have been thrilled with a “deceleration” of growth, i.e., a slowing of growth. However, Tim went a step further and achieved zero growth, perhaps a modest quantity of regression.

Now, the goal for the future is to do a little bit better in his program and achieve a drop. Time alone may help. A greater effort at weight loss would certainly help. But Tim can now do so from a position of safety, having dramatically reduced his risk for heart attack from its initial high risk.
 

Are you a wheat-aholic?

With a heart scan score of 1222, Leslie could be in deep trouble in short order.

At 64 years old, Leslie had gained nearly 40 lbs since she'd given up a lot of her activities caring for a husband who'd developed psychological difficulties and stopped contributing to the household duties. A tall woman at 5 ft 9 inches, she held her 202 lbs well, but her lipoprotein patterns were a disaster:

LDL particle number 2482 nmol/l—an equivalent LDL cholesterol of 248 mg/dl (drop the last digit)

HDL 38 mg/dl

Triglycerides 241 mg/dl

90% of LDL particles were small

Lipoprotein(a) 240 nmol/l


Blood sugar was in the pre-diabetic range at 112 mg/dl, C-reactive protein was high at 3.0 mg/l, blood pressure somewhat high at 140/84.

With the exception of lipoprotein(a), these patterns are exquisitely weight-sensitive. A reduction in weight would yield effects superior to any medication she could take.

Processed wheat products were a big problem for Leslie: whole wheat bread, pretzels for snacks, whole wheat pasta. Leslie admitted that she loved these products and couldn’t seem to get enough of them. Leslie was a helpless “wheat-aholic.”

Yes, wheat products sound healthy, even endorsed by the American Heart Association, often bearing "heart healthy" labels on the packages. Don't you believe it.

In particular, Leslie had the number one cause for heart disease in America: small LDL particles, a pattern that is magnified 30-70% by indulging in wheat products. Endorsed by the Heart Association?

Leslie was skeptical, worried that she would be hungry all the time and would have virtually nothing left to eat. Instead, when she returned to the office three months later, she reported that eating was easy, finding healthy foods not containing wheat was easier than she thought, she felt great, finding more energy than she'd had in years.

She also shed 30 lbs.

Leslie's lipoprotein patterns also reflected the weight loss. She achieved her 60:60:60 Track Your Plaque lipid targets, small LDL shrunk dramatically, blood sugar and blood pressure were back in normal ranges.

I see results like Leslie's several times every week. For those of us with patterns like Leslie's, or just obesity that accumulates in the abdomen, going wheat-free is among the most powerful single strategies I know of.

If you need convincing, try an experiment. Eliminate—not reduce, but eliminate wheat products from your diet, whether or not the fancy label on the package says it's healthy, high in fiber, a "healthy low-fat snack", etc. This means no bread, pasta, crackers, cookies, breads, chips, pancakes, waffles, breading on chicken, rolls, bagels, cakes, breakfast cereal. I find elimination of wheat easier than just cutting back. I believe this is because wheat is powerfully addictive. It's very similar to telling an alcoholic that a drink now and then is okay—it just doesn't work. They need to be alcohol-free. Most of us need to be wheat-free, not just cut back.

You won't be hungry if you replace the lost calories with plenty of raw almonds, walnuts, pecans, sunflower and pumpkin seeds; more liberal use of healthy olive oil, canola oil and flaxseed oil; adding ground flaxseed and oat bran to yogurt, cottage cheese, etc.; and more lean proteins like lean beef, chicken, turkey, fish, and eggs.

The majority of people who go wheat-free lose weight, sometimes dramatically. Most people also feel better: more energy, more alert, better sleep, less mood swings. Time and again, people who try this will tell me that the daytime grogginess they've suffered and lived with for years, and would treat with loads of caffeine, is suddenly gone. They cruise through their day with extra energy.

Even without weight loss, going wheat-free usually raises HDL, reduces the dreaded small LDL dramatically. It also reduces triglycerides, blood sugar, C-reactive protein, blood pressure. Blood sugar control in diabetics is far easier, with less fluctuations and sharp rises in blood sugar.

Success at this also yields great advantage for your heart scan score control and reversal efforts.
 

Heart scans: Mammograms of the heart

Some people have called CT heart scans the "mammogram of the heart." The analogy contains a lot of wisdom.

First of all, both mammograms and CT heart scans are screening tests, one for cancer, of course, the other for coronary atherosclerotic plaque. Both are performed in specific age groups, mammograms in women 40 years and over (generally), heart scans in women 50 years and over (generally), men 40 years and over.

    
Mammograms: Left, normal; right, a small mass.
(Courtesy Nat'l Institutes of Health and Wikipedia.)

Both are also meant to be repeated periodically when normal as a surveillance process.

Both use low quantities of radiation of about 0.3-0.4 mSv (the most real-life measure of total body exposure), a modest quantity of radiation.

Both are good for their purposes, though not perfect. Can a mammogram performed properly miss a small cancerous mass? Sure it can, but it's thankfully uncommon. Can a CT heart scan miss the non-calcified plaque prone to rupture? Sure it can, but this is also unlikely (<5% probability).

Given the exorbitant costs of medical tests in general, both mammograms and heart scans are quite inexpensive. On the flip side, they are both also quite unprofitable for centers providing the tests. Unfortunately, this means that mammography centers and heart scan centers come and go because of the difficulties of the profit-side of these services.

Both tests initially struggled to gain acceptance among the medical community. In 1960, for instance, mammograms were performed on standard x-ray devices, the same as that used to perform chest x-rays—low precision, high radiation when performed in this manner. In 1969, mammography devices designed specifically for this purpose made the scene. However, it took over 10 years for these new dedicated devices to become widely used. Use of mammograms has gradually increased over the ensuing 20 years. In other words, 47 years have passed since the introduction of mammography.

CT heart scans, of course, have had a shorter history of approximately 20 years, since engineer Dr. Douglas Boyd first invented the "ultra-fast" EBT devices, the first devices with sufficient scanning speed to scan the heart and coronary arteries.

One interesting difference between the two: In a woman between the age of 50 and 60, the likelihood of detecting cancer is 1 in 237. The likelihood of detecting coronary atherosclerotic plaque in a woman? About 1 in 4. Coronary disease eventually kills 1 in 3 females, hugely overshadowing breast cancer in frequency. It’s worse in males.

Progress on both fronts, one in cancer detection, the other in atherosclerotic coronary plaque detection. But still lots more progress to go.

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:

Heart scans and radiation: The Real story
Our concerns about radiation exposure all boil down to concern over lifetime risk for cancer, a disease that strikes approximately 20% of all Americans. Radiation is just one source of risk, though to some degree a controllable one. Where do heart scans fit in?


NEW FEATURE: Book Review - NO More Heart Disease 
 

Copyright 2007, Track Your Plaque