I am 30 years old, the Dr said if I have any plaque I can reverse it. Confused!

[mr_panicky]

I am 30 years old, the Dr said if I have any plaque I can reverse it. Confused!

I saws the cardiologist and he said that due to my age I can reverse any plaque build-up that I might have?

I thought it wasn't possible?

[starship]

I am so eager to hear what the others will have to say about plaque reversal. I have been spending alot of time searching online and borrowing books at the public library on that subject. I have been following the recipes from Robert E. Kowalski's book "The 8 week cholesterol cure cookbook". It is an older book but the recipes are very good and you don't feel deprived at all. [ REMOVED ] From all the books that I have read, I favor his because of the amount of research he has done and the down to earth way that he writes.

[Beefsteak]

Well, to my knowledge there is no treatment or drug that is known to work.
Plaque removal is extremely difficult because the plaque binds itself to the artery walls and can be covered with calcium material that further seals it.

The artery walls are elastic and in younger people they may expand or grow more easily to allow the passage of blood. (Arteries do of course have muscular walls.) Certainly athletes can have larger arteries and an artery of say 3mm diameter in an normal person may be 4 or even 5mm in an athlete. This allows for greater blood flow and develops from the exercises taken.
This however is not plaque removal and even marathon runners can have significant plaque deposits (even fully-blocked arteries in very rare cases - causing them to collapse or have heart attacks, even on the finish line).

High doses of statin drugs or combinations of statins with naicin have been claimed to show plaque reversal but the few studies undertaken have been questioned. "Crestor" was reported to show this, but the amount of Crestor taken was extremely high - about 10x the amount needed for control of blood cholesterol. The claimed reduction in plaque over a 2-year period was very small (<10%). (Crestor is a very powerful statin often criticised for the very high number of reports to the FDA of rhabdomyolysis - a life-threatening muscle destruction disease. Crestor also features at [url]www.worstpills.org[/url])

Weeding out the good research from the bad is difficult because all sorts of claims are made. Often the research is not proper "double-blind" research but that done where an association exists between the drug company and the researchers (eg funded by a drug company).

A small company called Esperion Therapeutics had a drug that it claimed reduced plaque but soon after they announced it they were bought out by Pfizer. Puzzling to me what happened after that but there has been no news after the buyout. The website and the company just seemed to disappear. The drug was called ETC-216 (ApoA-I Milano/phospholipid complex or AIM) and was claimed to rapidly reduce the size of plaque in coronary arteries and to reverse atherosclerosis. (I wonder if Pfizer were making too much money elsewhere?)

A more promising approach seems to be via generation of secondary arterial blood flow around or instead of the plaque-affected arteries (sometimes called angiogenesis). A few drugs are being tested that encourage this arterial flow to oxygen-starved muscle. One is Generx (Cardium Therapeutics), and is at a fairly advanced stage of testing. Application involves a one-off introduction to the specific heart muscle region via a catheter from the groin. Tests so far show improved blood flow lasting for periods of at least 6 and 12 months after application. That suggests (to me) the improvement may be permanent and therefore a cure to some extent.

However. not exactly a black-and-white subject to talk about - hope this helps.
Beefy

[Fathersson]

There certainly is no governmentally approved drug regimen that has been proven to reduce plaque buildup. The recent trials with crestor that showed plaque reduction were at very high doses (80mg the max currently allowed in the US). There is also a small trial using a synthetic HDL (via injections). The first cholesterol drug specifically targeted at raising HDL (CETP inhibitor's like Pfizer's torcetrapib) should be available in the next couple to few years, and it will be interesting to see how targeting HDL, not LDL, will affect heart disease.

The only proven method, and offically sanctioned one, to remove plaque, is via invasive mechanical means - Atherectomy (eg. laser ablation) - but these obviously have limited and specific application.

There is good evidence that reducing blood cholesterol (total and LDL) can at least slow down or halt the further buildup of plaque. But nobody, as yet, has a clear means to get rid of what is already there.

[Lenin]

Ornish has some good data substantiating plaque reversal with a <10% fat diet that has ZERO animal fats (including zero eggs and milk products.)
THis is not for the faint of heart.

Plaque is not a completely homogeneous mass. Generally it is composed of a lipid core with or without gangrenous infection. Surrounding it is muscle tissue from the artery, scar tissue and calcium accretions. Some are "soft" almost all fat and some are low fat and mostly scar and calcium.
I think fat is generally present as a sizeable portion of any plaque and this can be lowered by placing the plaque in a very low fat milieu...low serum lipids in the liquid that endlessly bathes the plaques.
Removal of this fat will shrink the plaque but I doubt that little can be done to remove the scar tissue and calcium shell.

As for the pus core, if it is released it is either broken up and removed by the white blood cells OR it causes an MI .

All in all, I think the evidence is very good for diminishing plaque with very tight statin control of blood lipids. We must remember that it took 40, 50, or 60 years to make these horrible structures. A drug that shows appreciable results in 2 years might very well be expected to show STARTLINGLY good results in 10 or 20 years!

Alas, the REVERSAL study was less than heartening but even there atorvastatin (80mg high dose) reversed plaque by a teeny -.4% over 18 months. But this compares favorably with pravastatin (40 mg. weak statin) users who got a significant INCREASE over 18 months (+2.7%.)
Since the tendency, if nothing is done, is for the plaque burden to increase with time, anybody who can get status quo or a decrease of .4% is winning this game. Goal of LDL <100mg/dL was achieved by 97% of the atorvastatin (Lipitor) users but only 67% of Pravachol users.

More studies are needed but measuring plaque isn't cheap or easy to do...except at autopsy!

But I think the evidence is pretty good to assume that levels of LDL below 70, the current super-goal for proven atherosclerotic people, will reverse plaque at a decent rate. Especially if even LDL<100 gets some small results.