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.