Heart disease is the leading cause of death of adults in America. All too often, the first symptom of heart disease is a heart attack. To combat this, doctors having been using a “standard lipid panel” for many years to look for increased risk for arterial disease. But the truth is, these lipid panels are not enough. Nearly 50% of people who have a cardiac event had normal lipids at the time of the attack. Fortunately at Whole Health Concord, we can do better to evaluate your risk. Heart disease is a preventable condition, and in many cases, it’s also reversible!
Using a more comprehensive blood test, we learn infinitely more than what a standard lipid panel tells us. We learn about the level of inflammation within your vessel walls. The biggest threat to the blood vessels in your heart is new plaque formation occurring elsewhere in the system as it is fragile and can break off and lodge in a critical location. If vascular inflammation can be normalized, wouldn’t you like to know if it was there and how to reverse it? We also learn about genetic factors that may be contributing to your risk. Most people are not routinely screened for clotting disorders that predispose their bodies to form clots. The solution can be quite simple if you know that the problem is there. Have you been told that you have a lot of “bad” cholesterol and not a lot of “good”? This is an over-simplified explanation of an over-simplified test. There is a bigger story occurring in your circulatory system. The systematic movement of cholesterol in the body is mapped out by particles in your system that respond to your body’s signals. Where is this cholesterol coming from? Are you over-producing cholesterol in response to a signal? Are you over-absorbing it from your diet? By looking closely, we can understand not only where it’s coming from, but how effectively your body is dealing with this dynamic molecule.
What’s the treatment? Conventionally, statins are the medication-of-choice as well as the standard of care to decrease cholesterol levels. But statins don’t affect all of the elements we’ve discussed. What about inflammation and genetic mutations? What about cell membrane rigidity? Natural therapies and lifestyle optimization can and do normalize these markers. If we know what the problems in the system are, we can know how to best treat it, and we can track our progress. At Whole Health Concord, once we have identified your level of risk, we provide you with the tools to treat and reverse the problem.
Heart disease is no longer a mystery nor a lifetime sentence. Join us at Whole Health Concord on January 19, 2017 at 6:00pm to learn about cardiovascular testing and what it can do for you.
