LifeCare Chiropractic

The Best Chiropractic Care in Mesa, Arizona

Heart Disease

TELOMERIC AGING IN PATIENTS WITH HEART DISEASE

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Healthy fats the fountain of youth?  Telomeres are the little tags of DNA at the end of our chromosomes.  The longer the telomere, the longer that cell can live.  Shorten the telomere and the cell will die faster.

Recent study found that the higher the blood levels of EPA/DHA (the essential fatty acids found in fish) the longer the telomere and the slower it got shortened.  Essentially the fountain of youth.  Increase your intake through supplementation, wild game, omega-3 eggs, flax, fatty vegetarian fish (the carnivores like mahi, ahi and halibut have higher levels of mercury), nuts, seeds, avacodos.  Oh..and remember the USDA food pyramid that brainwashed all of us to avoid fat for several decades?  Scrap it…

DIAGNOSED WITH HEART DISEASE AND WANT TO KNOW HOW TO REVERSE IT?

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DIAGNOSED WITH HEART DISEASE AND WANT TO KNOW HOW TO REVERSE IT? We’ve seen studies trying to lower the amount of plaquing in the carotid arteries, most focusing on a drug. There was big controversy with Vytorin where we actually saw better cholesterol, but low and behold the vessels were getting more clogged on the …drug. Not exactly what we’re looking for.

This study looked at lifestyle changes over two years and found that the carotid arteries got cleaner. Not that this is jaw dropping, but it once again proves that lifestyle can perform where pharmaceutical drugs cannot.

WAYS TO LOWER RISK OF HEART DISEASE

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Good news! Or bad… those with higher levels of sexual activity have a lower risk of heart disease. The association is strong enough that doctors should be asking their patients about their sexual activity levels to help determine risk of heart disease. Before you go running home to show this to your partner, consider the reverse…impotence is strongly linked to heart disease.

And Viagra or Cialis, despite the commercials, is NOT the answer. The answer is to turn lifestyle around and lower your risk of heart disease.  In turn, for both males AND females, ability to “perform” will improve dramatically. How’s THAT for incentive!

Read entire article here

 

DO CLINICAL TRIALS HAVE ANY EFFECT ON HEART DISEASE?

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Heart disease and clinical trials. It’s very common to use something called “surrogate endpoints” in drug trials. Basically, if a marker like cholesterol gets better w/ a drug, then we MUST be having an effect on heart disease, right?

Unfotunately, the answer is usually a big no. But it does make the drug look effective to doctors who don’t read medical research. In this review, the surrogate endpoint of plaque in the coronary arteries (which is used commonly w/ statin drug trials) was shown to have no impact in rates of cardiac events.

Read entire article here

 

ARE EVERYDAY HEADACHES DANGEROUS?

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Last update December 19, 2014

Are everyday headaches dangerous?
Naeblys/Dollar Photo Club

I’ve been a strong opponent of the way we treat migraines in this healthcare system.  In general, we keep trying different medications until the doctor finds a medication that reduces or stops the headaches.  Then we all jump up and down and pat each other on the back and call the process a success.  If this is the approach your doctor has taken, then there ARE times when an everyday headache can be dangerous to your long term health.

Why?  Because a migraine headache is unquestionably a cerebral (brain) manifestation of a systemic problem.  If all we do is medicate the headache, we just signed an early death certificate for the patient because we have not fixed the problem.  All we have done is control the symptoms.  The “problem” was not a deficiency of Topimax or Depakote or Lyrica.  Giving these drugs may control the symptoms, but in now way fix the problem that caused the headache in the first place.

So what is the problem?

A great place to look is at the blood vessels.  Our vasculature that brings blood to every cell of our body.  With this blood comes important nutrients, vitamins and minerals for a brain cell to function at its best.

When there is a problem with our blood vessels, our brain cells can’t get the nutrients it needs to make ATP.  In case you don’t remember back to high school biology, ATP is the “energy currency” of our cells.  It is what every cell needs to do anything and everything.  The more ATP available, the healthier the cell.  The less ATP available, the sicker the cell becomes.

In cells that require very high levels of energy, such as our muscles, our heart and our brain, this process is absolutely critical.  If the brain does can not get the nutrients it needs to make enough ATP, a migraine or a seizure may be the result.

Ok.  “So what exactly is the problem with poor vascular health”, you ask.  With few exceptions, no one has a heart attack before they have a problem with the blood vessels leading to the heart.  No one has a stroke without first having a problem with the blood vessels in the brain.  Dementia begins with poor blood supply to the brain.

If you don’t fix the vascular problem that is contributing to the migraine, you are allowing unchecking damage to your blood vessels to occur.  With enough time, this will lead to a heart attack, a stroke or the slow process of dementia and loss of your cognitive function.

Medications will NOT fix this.  In fact, in several cases they will make the process worse.

This is strongly confirmed by this current study linking migraine with aura and cardiovascular disease.  Strangely, the risk of stroke was massive (380% increased risk) in women with NO established risk factors for heart disease.  However, in those women who DID have risk factors for heart disease and experienced migraines with aura, the risk of having a heart attack was increased 334%.

In other words, you can’t win either way.  Having migraines with aura will either lead to a heart attack or a stroke.  The ONLY way to save yourself is to make the changes needed to improve your vascular health.

Sadly,  despite all this research, I have yet to EVER have a patient come in with migraines that were given any type of lifestyle advice by any other provider (specialists included).  So yes–Everyday headaches can be dangerous.  Even deadly.

 

LUMBAR DISC PROBLEMS? YOU MAY HAVE THIS…

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Nothing in the body happens in a vacuum.  Every single systems interacts with every other system.   People at increased risk for heart disease are at increased risk of colon cancer.  Diabetes increases the risk for Alzheimers and Parkinsons.  So what about disc degeneration / arthritis of the lumbar spine?

First of all, we need to understand what contributes to disc degeneration in the lumbar spine.  Several factors have been identified.  Genetics may play a role, but it’s likely to be the smaller role.

There are some strong associations between cardiovascular disease and disc degeneration.  The inside 2/3 of the disc does not have its own blood supply, but rather gets its nutrients from small blood vessels in the bone of the vertebral body above and below.  These small blood vessels may very likely be what links heart disease and disc degeneration. 

Early atherosclerosis (plaquing of the arteries) due to cardiovascular disease, will reduce blood flow through these small blood vessels and thereby reduce nutrient delivery to the inside of the discs.  In addition, the outer 1/3, which does have its own direct blood supply, will also be affected by this plaquing.

Less nutrients means less ability to heal which means a greater likelihood of breaking down faster.  This leads to early onset disc degeneration.  So what does this really mean? 

It means that disc degeneration, because it is occuring throughout the body, is not going to be limited to only one area of the spine.  Supporting this, this study finds links between lumbar disc degeneration and cervical disc degeneration.  As a matter of fact, in those patients who had lumbar disc degeneration, almost every one (98%) had cervical disc degeneration.

However, in the control group who had neither low back or neck pain, 88.5% had disc degeneration in the cervical spine.  Wow!  That’s a really high number.  Keep in mind these people were pain free, and yet the vast majority had “problems” found on MRI.  Consider this next time your primary care doctor orders an MRI and refers you for a surgical consult…

WORRIED ABOUT STROKE? IT’S EASY TO PREVENT

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It’s your brain. That vital structure sitting atop your neck and protected by your skull. Damage to our brains, whether through a slow process like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, or through a rapid event like a stroke, scares almost everyone. Frustratingly, we continue to live in a society that makes us think this is a random event and we have little to do with preventing these events.

This could not be further from the truth, whether we are talking about a disease such as Alzheimer’s or an event like a stroke.  This particular study against illustrates just how massively powerful healthy lifestyle choices are at protecting against stroke.

Participants were graded based on 5 factors– smoking, body mass index, physical activity, and vegetable and alcohol consumption.  Those with adherence of all 5 factors had a whopping 67% lower risk of having a stroke.  The association was graded, meaning that the more factors you had, the better the protection—so that even one had a beneficial effect.

It’s your brain. Without it you are merely an elected government representative.  Is it worth adopting these factors to protect it?

MY DAD HAD LOW BACK PAIN, SO I GUESS I’LL GET IT

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It is not an uncommon belief for a person to think that, because one or both of their parents suffered from low back pain that they, too, will suffer from low back pain.  While genetics may play a role, it is nowhere near the most critical one.

This particular study on twins finds that genetics only play about a 11-13% role for patients who have both low back pain and lumbar disc degeneration.  This means that there are other factors at play in the risk for developing low back pain.

In general, the better we take care of ourselves, the lower our risk of developing disc degeneration.  This means adopting a lifestyle that avoids diabetes, exercising and maintaining flexibility through things like yoga.

You see, the discs of our spine do not have their own blood supply. Rather, they are fed nutrients through smaller blood vessels.  So what happens if plague begins to form on these important blood vessels bringing nutrients to the disc?  You guessed it–reduced nutrient delivery and the disc cannot keep up with physiological demands so it begins to break down.

So, protecting your heart will also protect these important blood vessels which will, in turn, protect the discs of your spine.  Certainly other factors like imbalance, poor posture and past trauma play a role as well, but I do not feel that the role is as great as protecting the blood vessels that feed nutrients to our discs.

The lucky thing is that an anti-diabetic lifestyle just so happens to also be an anti-heart disease / pro blood vessel health lifestyle.  See how nicely that works out?  Just when you thought you were going to have to pick a disease you wanted to avoid with lifestyle..