You're home alone. Maybe it's the middle of the afternoon, maybe it's 3 in the morning. There's a pressure in your chest, or a strange ache in your jaw, or you're suddenly short of breath and sweating for no reason you can name. Nobody is in the next room. Your first thought is probably, "Let me wai...

Silent Atherosclerosis: 57% of Healthy Adults Already Have Plaque

A new study just imaged the arteries of 16,808 adults who had no known heart disease. No prior heart attack. No stroke. No stents. No bypass. Just ordinary people between 18 and 70 years old who would tell you, if you asked, that their...

Repatha Cut All-Cause Death by 20% in People Who Never Had a Heart Attack

Most large cholesterol trials are built to show fewer heart attacks and strokes. Very few of them are built to show fewer deaths (all-cause mortality). Studies aren't generally powered for all-cause mortality. This is an impo...

Colchicine and Heart Disease: Reading the Negative Trials Honestly

I want to walk you through one of the more interesting stories in cardiology right now, because it is not a story about a drug that failed. It is a story about what happens when a genuinely good hypothesis meets a genuinely large tri...

Frank's Sign: Does It Mean You Have Heart Disease

In 1973, an American pulmonologist named Sanders T. Frank published a brief report noting something peculiar about his patients with coronary artery disease. Many of them had a diagonal crease running across the earlobe, extending from the tragus to...

Statins, Cholesterol, And Your Brain

Your brain does not need circulating cholesterol. In fact, cholesterol circulating in your blood stream inside of lipoproteins can not get into your brain. Lipid lowering medications affect circulating cholesterol, not brain cholesterol. It's important to unders...

Intestinal Absorption of Cholesterol

Having an overall understanding of lipid and lipoprotein metabolism is important to understanding how we arrive at cholesterol in our arteries and develop atherosclerosis.

The first step is cholesterol or fatty acids arriving inside your intestinal lumen. This ...

North Karelia Finland 84% Reduction In Death Rates

In a beautiful example of how dietary and lifestyle interventions work, the country of Finland was able to reduce cardiovascular mortality by 84% in North Karelia by making a few simple dietary and lifestyle changes.

The year was 1972. North Karelia i...

Your Morning Coffee and Your Heart: What the American Heart Association Actually Found

Caffeine is the most widely consumed drug on the planet, and most people drinking it have no idea what it does to their cardiovascular system. The American Heart Association just released a landmark scientific st...

Four Types of Prevention and the Power of Lowering LDL

The old model of preventing heart disease had two categories. Modern cardiology has four, and knowing where you fall could change the course of your life.

Cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death worldwide, claiming nearly 18 mill...