At 51 years old, James "Soprano" Gandolfini died of a heart attack. Tragic. So Young. So Great.
Did you know HALF of all heart attacks are the persons first symptom. People have walked out of a hospital with a clean bill of health and dropped over from a heart attack. Heart attacks have some unkowns, and today we are going to unravel a few of them.
Would that be worth your next 10 minutes?
Let’s start with what we all know, or what we assume is true. We can all agree that heart disease is the leading cause of death.
So why can’t we conquer heart disease?
Really heart disease is a new problem. It has been a bugger for the past 60 years, but closer to the 1900’s it was rare, really rare. Heart disease is a by-product of modern western living. No disease has risen to prominence so fast. In less than 50 years heart disease went from being rare to the leading cause of death and hasn’t looked back. Now cancer flip flops for the top spot, depending on the year. But, that's a whole other class.
Early authors, implicated the FAT content of western diets as the main problem plugging up all the arteries. Aahaa, Mr. Watson we have solved the mystery. Not so fast. After all, when patients come in, I see the box on their prescription sheets “follow a low-fat diet”, checked off. I think that check box has been there for 60 years.
The current medical view is that the arteries accumulate plaque and slowly narrow. In times of stress on the heart (exercise or emotional trauma) either the blood flow is insufficient and a patient gets “angina” (heart pain) or a piece of plaque breaks off and blocks the artery altogether and there is a sudden heart attack. Death comes if the amount of damage to the heart is great enough. Sounds logical.
Hey what about cholesterol?
That’s the gunk that is lining the arteries. Dr. Ancel Keyes began this idea in the 1950’s and for more than 50 years nothing has really changed. So now we have drugs to lower cholesterol and low-fat diets and since the nail is in the coffin, there is only one question that remains. Why do arteries plaque? This is modern cardiology’s mission to find out “why”, and how to prevent plaque from breaking off.
If we skip all the medical, commercial, and pharmaceutical mumbo jumbo and just look at the facts, there are a lot of questions that still have not been answered.
Why don’t people have a kidney, or liver, or pancreas attacks? If there is plaque in the arteries, all of them are affected. Why does the heart seem to suffer
Not all heart attack victims have artery plaque? or blockages?
According to actual autopsy research. After a person dies from a heart attack the longer it takes to do an autopsy the more blockage a person has. The authors concluded that the arterial blockages are a consequence, not a cause, of the heart attack.
After a 20 year study by the VA and the NIH on bypass surgery, they concluded that long-term survival was no different between surgery and medications.
We clearly don’t know a lot about heart attacks. The theory that blockages cause heart attacks is not a very strong one.
That is probably enough head spinning for one day. We will look into another possibility that fits all of our criteria. I’ll be nice and give you a clue. Heart attacks are more common in diabetics for a particular reason.