So TIME magazine knew about this way
back in 2004. You can't see that very
well but that says February 23rd 2004
Time magazine. The cover illustration, "The
secret Killer: The surprising link
between inflammation and heart attacks,
cancer, Alzheimer's and other diseases.
And what you can do to fight it." That's
15 years ago. So why is your doc still
focused on cholesterol?
It's a good question and there is a
little something to cholesterol. It's not
at totally negligible. However, why are
docs still continuing to fail to
focus on inflammation? I get a lot of
questions about inflammation. That's one
of the key components of this channel.
I've developed a course on it and I'll
talk a little bit about that course. We
had a question recently about one of the
inflammation tests. There are tests that
you can do to see how much inflammation
you have going on.
What is inflammation? Well, we'll cover a
little bit of that in this discussion as
well and then we'll talk about how just
like everything else it gets complicated.
The bottom line is: what is inflammation?
It's where your own immune system is
attacking your body for one reason
or another. This is a diagram of plaque.
This is your immune system cells going...
This is the bloodstream. This is your
immune system cells going in to attack
plaque. Now again and then we'll get back
to the comment on how to find the course.
This course, by the way, is like... it's like
a... it takes about an hour and a half...
maybe two hours total. And once you take
the course, you can understand what is
inflammation, why is it important, what
are the tests involved in looking for
your own inflammation, how to get those
tests, what the major causes are for that
test including. If you've watched any of
the videos on this channel (ah gosh what)
at least a third of them talked about
the number one cause: insulin resistance.
But it doesn't get that much further
into insulin resistance. We have a
different course on that. This course, by
the way, we've just put up recently, we
made it a couple of months ago started
releasing it and more of a beta version.
It's already become very popular. We've
gotten a lot of focus on it, a lot of
interest. Now how do you... real quick how...
do you find it? You go to the prevmed
website. This is what it looks like and
then you scroll down. You used to have a
little banner a black banner up at the
top that doesn't get there. Now you
scroll down. In fact, I'll show you.
Before I do, let me make a couple of
other plugs. We're having an event in
Louisville where we actually offer
cardiovascular inflammation testing,
insulin resistance testing, the CIMT. We
go deep in terms of why do any
cholesterol testing... what you can get out
of it. We provide all these tests and we
provide CIMT and we spend a couple of
days talking about it and talking about
your results and where you can go from
there.
If you opt into the evaluation version, you get a complete
one-on-one evaluation with myself and
with Janice (our health coach) as well. But
let's get back to some more comments
about Lp-PLA2. This discussion
about PLAC2 was started by Patrick
Nabors. Basically, he said,
"Thanks for your videos. I've been doing
some good work." He started on a Crest or,
started cutting his carbs, then he made
significant improvement in his PLAC2.
But he began to wonder about which
PLAC2 and just like we said before
everything gets really complicated. This
is another version or image of PLAC2
and what it is. You see macrophages and
monocytes come in from the blood
stream here, go through the endothelium
or intima layer, and then
start getting hooked into trying to
dissolve this light-orange looking stuff.
And in this case, it's plaque. One thing you
find out is that PLAC is actually a
marker for
thin capped necrotic plaque. Meaning what
many people used to think of was a
vulnerable plaque. What we now realize is
there is no such thing as the vulnerable
plaque. If you've got a plaque process
going on and you've got this activity
going on with monocytes and other immune
cells attacking that plaque, then what
you have is cardiovascular inflammation.
So again, this is one of the key tests
for cardiovascular inflammation. Now as
you see here we covered this in another
video but Cleveland Heart as well as
Mayo and some of the others have
recently gone from a concentration test
to an activity assay. Now what does that
mean. Again gets a little bit complicated
but bear with me for about two minutes
and I'll get through the complicated
stuff. But first very quickly what is
PLAC2? Lipoprotein-associated
phospholipase (Lp-PLA2), one of the things.. that's
important about that is it's lipoprotein-
associated. So what happens is this. They
found that in the earlier concentration
studies and in immunoassay studies mass
spec studies, what they were getting was
PLAC2 that was linked or bound to
that lipoprotein because remember PLAC2
is working on the LDL in that
lipoprotein and oxidizing it. So from
many perspectives many people think that
it is an actor, an active component of
cardiovascular inflammation. As we get
deeper into a recent study that just
again helps to underline the
complication of the labs associated here,
they're taking they're correlating
activity versus concentration here.
They're correlating activity versus the
immunoassay. What's an immunoassay? It's
ELISA - enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay
and it's where you incubate the
enzymes with a marker and then take a
look at that marker on a minute on a gel
plate. Again
I told you I was only going to go a
couple of minutes into the complicated
stuff but let's get back up to what is
this testing and how to find the
inflammation panel. The inflammation
course... the inflammation discussion... this
is another image of what would what
many would consider a vulnerable plaque
as you see here the intima cells at the
top are getting worn out. Looked like
they're getting ready to pop. This image
actually came from an article where
there was a there were several trials
looking at different drugs which might
actually stop or decrease the activity
of PLAC2. That's how much focus has
gone into trying to manage this
inflammation process. Bottom line was
those studies were not successful so
I've gone I've gone from maybe 10,000
feet way down into the weeds very quick.
Let's get back up to about 10,000 feet.
How do you find the inflammation course?
You go to our website, you follow the
arrows down again it used to be on a
black banner up here. You follow the
arrows down and you get to this part
right at the bottom of the front
page the home page on our website again
Maybe I've taken too long to talk about
some simple items. I just wanted to make
folks aware that we have this resource
available. It's only a couple of hours
and we also have some other things
available as well to help you sift
through the complications of evaluating
your own heart attack and stroke risk.
Thank you for your interest.
Do you have bleeding when you go to the
dentist or when you do a dental floss? If
you do, be very afraid not of the
dentist's of dental flossing. Be very
afraid of heart attack and stroke,
thinking insulin resistance, prediabetes,
diabetes. Thanks.
