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Wellness Wednesday for September 18, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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My father is dying from atherosclerosis. He's in his mid 70s and having regular strokes and heart attacks. It seems like every year there's a new stent, and every time he's in the hospital it takes some of his remaining vitality away.

I'd like to avoid the same outcome! My LDL cholesterol levels are slightly elevated and I am about 40. I was taking low dose statins, but my doctor declined to renew my prescription based on a risk model that (correctly) calculates my risk of a cardiac event in the next ten years being low. However, my understanding is that the mechanical damage of arterial plaque build up is happening right now, and it's that plaque deposition that will eventually give me the cardiac events that will kill me.

I'm seeing from Peter Attia and others a focus on ApoB LDL lipoproteins in particular cause atherosclerosis and he insists that crushing your ApoB levels will eliminate the risk of heart disease. Other health influencers dispute this, and I'm not really sure who to believe.

I'm wondering if anybody else has investigated the various claims around preventing atherosclerosis and has strong opinions on them. If there is some good evidence that a therapy could work without much risk of side-effects, the upside could be substantial.