Got a phone call from Mom.
She’s been doing some genie…geneaol…geneua…family history research. She’s discovered a number if interesting facts, not the least of which is that we’ve had ancestors on this continent since the late 1600s (much longer than that if you count the occasional Native American ancestor). But more to the point in THIS post is the fact that no male on my father’s bloodline has ever lived past 60. My old man ws the first, but he recently celebrated his 61st birthday with a 6x bypass–which led to ALL KINDS of jokes about him hanging out in the pediatric ward standing on patients’ oxygen hoses. Aside from a few soldierly deaths and one bear mauling, the guys all seem to have died from heart failure. No other malady has been identified in any records MawSquaw (as we now call her) uncovered.
Armed with the info I prance into my doctor’s office and say, “Hey dude, let’s have a look at my blood.” A week later we sit down and he tells me to avoid open flames if I have a bleeding wound cuz I’m basically a walking grease ball. Total cholesterol was 175 but the LDL was too high, etc. and there were acouple other factors that were just plain stupidly high. Doc said, “Yup. 60 looks about right until you have some serious plaque problems.” So I go home with my 30 day supply of Lipitor and grab the mail on the way in. HOORAY! My monthly DISCOVER mag came! And it happens to fall open to an article about the cholesterol myth…essentially, the argument boils down to, “Nah, there’s no correlation between cholesterol and arteriosclerosis, the real problem has to do with too little Folacin, B6 & B12 in the diet.”
OK. Matchka is confused. I don’t like to take drugs, and Lipitor for life doesn’t sound too pleasant, especially if it’s not dealing with a problem that I can handle with a multivitimin.
Any docs got input? Any links to research supporting either camp in this argument?
A high level of LDL-cholesterol is a risk factor for having a heart attack. But, it is just one factor. Other ‘classical’ risk factors include family history, smoking, diabetes, obesity, and high blood pressure. In VERY general terms, everything else being equal, each one doubles your risk. So, having three of the factors increases your risk 8-fold.
There is no doubt that lowering cholesterol will reduce the chances of a heart attack. Equally, and to be honest, there is also no doubt that a helluva lot of people must be treated with, say, a statin medicine, to prevent one heart attack. So, the gain is real but not huge.
There’s increasing evidence that low levels of things like folate and B12 may be associated with a higher chance of heart attacks. But, to this point AFAIK, there is no evidence to prove that taking these substances as supplements will lower the risk.
Bottom lines:
stop smoking
control blood pressure
exercise (to reduce cholesterol, control body weight, decrease diabetes chance, improve blood pressure, etc, etc)
avoid saturated fats in the diet (mostly animal source and junk foods)
consider a medicine to lower cholesterol if the level is “really” high or if there are other risk factors or if there’s already atheresclerosis present
And, most importantly, pick your parents carefully!
In jargon terms, “association doesn’t prove causality”.
In other words, maybe there’s something deeper that explains both the high levels of folate and the low rate of heart attacks. Specifically, perhaps people who eat lots of vegetables have low chance of heart attacks because the vegetables contain an important (but as yet undiscovered) substance that prevents heart attacks. Since vegetables contain folate, when we measure folate levels in the blood of people who eat lots of vegetables, the levels will be high. We won’t know to measure for the mystery, protective substance. All we’d see is that people with high levels of folate in the blood have a low heart attack risk. But, we’d be very mistaken to attribute the low heart attack risk to the high folate.
This seems to be EXACTLY the case for vitamin E. As you may know, high levels of vitamin E are associated with a lower heart attack risk. Yet, when studies were done to give people vitamin E supplements, there was NO change in their heart attack risk. Presumably, the association of high levels of vitamin E with low risk of heart attack is due to something else, not the vitamin E. Perhaps people who have high levels of vitamin E also tend to have high levels of another substance that protects against heart disease. Or maybe people who eat foods with lots of vitamin E exercise more, or have less stress … no one knows.
Discover is probably better for your brain than Entertainment Weekly or something, but they love sensationalist stories, and I can say for certain that while some of their astronomy articles are fairly good, many are overblown and more than a tad misleading. In particular, they seem to love to take some poorly-supported hypothesis held by a very small number of researchers and portray it as the bold new idea destined to overthrow the orthodoxy. Every once in a while I get really sucked in by some fascinating article titled something like “Could everything we know about the Out-of-Africa hypothesis / petroleum production / the germ theory of disease be wrong?”, and then I come across a physics or astronomy article that’s a real boner, and I remind myself, oh, yeah, it’s Discover. In the end I think you come out knowing more about the real science than you started (which is why I’m a loyal subscriber) but take it all with a grain of salt.
but the LDL was too high, etc. and there were acouple other factors that were just plain stupidly high. Doc said, “Yup. 60 looks about right until you have some serious plaque problems.” So I go home with my 30 day supply of Lipitor and grab the mail on the way in. HOORAY! My monthly DISCOVER mag came! And it happens to fall open to an article about the cholesterol myth…essentially, the argument boils down to, “Nah, there’s no correlation between cholesterol and arteriosclerosis, the real problem has to do with too little Folacin, B6 & B12 in the diet.”