Heart Disease: Why We Should Rename Heart Disease to ‘Overloaded Liver Syndrome.’
This is more of a ‘random thoughts’ post. It’s not lengthy, but hopefully one to get you thinking a bit differently about heart disease and a way to improve your risk assessment, if not for you, for a loved one.
Why do we call heart dis
ease, ‘heart disease?’ We don’t call a car accident, ‘excessive tire tracking.’ Imagine if we did treat a car accident like we do heart disease. Yes, there is an immediate need at the scene to make sure everyone is safe and traffic doesn’t get too backed up but then an investigation happens looking at the series of events that lead to ‘excessive tire tracking.’
There could be texting, speed, substance abuse, deer, or a faulty traffic light. But policy isn’t made regarding the effect of the accident, the presence of tire tracks. Policy is made to reduce the root causes of the accident.
With heart disease, the standard of care is to label the scene of the accident, call that the cause, and design national campaigns and policy regarding that finding. You have high blood pressure. You have clogged arteries. You have thick blood. You should be screened.
Yet, we ignore the tell tale signs that a heart event is on the horizon. We know things like inflammation and insulin resistance are major risk factors affecting the heart. But those are rarely quantified until after the heart event has hit.
Our healthcare system lacks the investigation. And the more we try and boost heart health and early detection of heart problems, the more heart disease rises. This happens for every diagnosis. Cancer is an effect. Diabetes is an effect. Arthritis is an effect. Yes, the current health expression may need immediate attention but that treatment doesn’t ever work to create health. So I’m proposing we change the name of heart disease to something like ‘liver overload syndrome.’
1958 Cholesterol Wisdom
A friend of mine passed an article to me from The Wall Street Journal. It was an article about how stress raises cholesterol. My initial mental reaction was, ‘Duh, what have I been talking about for the past 10 years?’ Teaching moment: Pride comes before the fall.
I was all proud of myself that I was ahead of the curve from a major publication. As I looked for the references in The Wall Street Journal article, one was from back in 1958. This information that lifestyle (not just bad bugs, bad luck, or bad genes) affects health outcomes was being quantified 20 years before I was born. More specifically, they were looking at how stress affects cholesterol and blood clotting.
The 1958 study was titled ‘Changes in the Serum Cholesterol and Blood Clotting Time in Men Subjected to Cyclic Variation of Occupational Stress.’ It is published in the journal Circulation by the American Heart Association. The intro to the study states the following:
Accountants were selectively chosen as a self-controlled group for studying effects of cyclic occupational stress upon serum cholesterol and blood clotting time, since their routine work schedule is interrupted by urgent tax deadlines, associated with severe occupational stress. Forty male accountants (age 28 to 56) were bled biweekly for serum cholesterol and monthly for blood clotting time from January to June 1957. Complete records also were kept of weight, exercise, diet, relative work load, and any exposure to unusual avocational stress. When studied individually, each subject’s highest serum cholesterol consistently occurred during severe occupational or other stress, and his lowest at times of minimal stress. The results could not be ascribed to any changes of weight, exercise, or diet. Marked acceleration of blood clotting time consistently occurred at the time of maximum occupational stress, in contrast to normal blood clotting during periods of respite. The possible implications of these results are discussed in relation to the problem of clinical coronary artery disease.
In the chart above, group A are ‘tax’ accountants. Group B is made up of ‘corporate’ accountants. These are plots of cholesterol levels tested in 2 week intervals from January to June. Of particular interest is that the corporate accountants had higher cholesterol levels and a higher reported stress level in January than in April. But overall, it’s evident the spike in cholesterol correlates with the as the April 15 tax deadlines.
Heart Smart…Really?
It’s February and with no surprise, the media is all over ‘heart disease’ awareness campaigns. But if you keep following what the media (and your doctor) push, you will probably get what most of Americans are going to get.
What are Americans going to get?
How about 1 in 3 will die of CardioVascular Disease (CVD)? How about a death from CVD every 40 seconds?
How about every 40 seconds someone has a stroke and about every 4 minutes someone dies from a stroke?
They like to say deaths have decreased from CVD by 31% from 2000 – 2010. How about an almost 30% increase in heart related surgeries from 2000 to 2010? I’ll give it to modern medicine for saving your life in the immediate danger but if our healthcare system was truly about health, you shouldn’t be laying on the OR table in the first place.
How about 920,000 Americans having a heart attack this year? How about 1/2 of those will show no prior symptom? How about 1/2 of those silent heart attacks have a first symptom of death?
And if you don’t think your health is at risk, how about your wallet? Since we are shifting to a universal health care system, your taxes go to paying $315 Billion dollars every year. Don’t think your tax dollars are paying for it? In 2010, it was estimated that over 2150 Americans died every day of CVD. That equates to about 785,000 deaths/year in 2010 (today it’s estimated closer to 1 million). ONLY 150,000 came from people younger than 65.
What rite of passage does a 65 year old have in this country? They qualify for Medicare, the government funded health plan. How does the government fund a health plan? Through your tax dollars.
One of the ways that the media via the government and heart association try to change your behavior is to drill into your head that cholesterol is the enemy and is an early warning sign of CVD and should be controlled…or you will die.
A UCLA study analyzing heart attack patients nationwide found that 75% of the heart attack victims had LDL (supposed bad cholesterol) within the safe limit. The researchers analyzed data from 136,905 patients whose lipid levels upon hospital admission were documented in the AHA data base. This accounted for 59 percent of total hospital admissions for heart attack at participating hospitals between 2000 and 2006.
The deadly irony is that the researchers conclude that maybe cholesterol isn’t low enough? How about opening your mind to the possibility that the cholesterol – heart disease connection is about as solid as the Iraq War – Weapons of Mass destruction connection?