Cartoon II for the holidays

 

Cartoon I for the holidays

 Sent to me by alert readers Jocelyn and Cheryl.

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Your cholesterol is probably normal—for you

 My older daughter (age 66) recently had a blood draw that showed a cholesterol level of 323. “Normal” is supposedly around 200. Like me, she refuses statins. Her doctor ordered a CAT scan to look for clogged arteries (plaque deposits). Here are the results: “No identifiable atherosclerotic plaque. Very low cardiovascular disease risk. Less than 5% chance of presence of coronary heart disease. Patient has less coronary calcification than can be expected based on gender and age. …no further evaluation is recommended.”

People are different, as I discussed in the following blog post that I wrote on November 27, 2016.

As I’ve said in an earlier post, I refuse to have my cholesterol checked. As far as I’m concerned, all this worry about cholesterol is nonsense. Our livers manufacture cholesterol for a reason: cholesterol is essential to life. It constitutes half the dry weight of your cerebral cortex; it’s essential for producing many important hormones, including testosterone and estrogen; it is used as the raw material in tissue repair; it is an important component of cell membranes; it’s used for the production of vitamin D; it facilitates mineral metabolism, serotonin uptake in the brain, and regulation of blood sugar levels…and on and on.

Like much else in the natural world, the range of cholesterol values follow a normal distribution curve—a bell curve. This is a fundamental and widely used concept of statistical analysis. For example, if you measured the height of the population within a country you would find that a small number of people are very short; most people are average; a small number are very tall. The short, tall, and average-sized people are all normal. The same is true for cholesterol. Some of us naturally have low cholesterol and some naturally have high cholesterol and most of us are somewhere in between. All are normal, but most fall in the 200-250 milligrams per deciliter of blood (mine, if I recall, was 240 thirteen years ago, the last time it was checked). [Update: make that 22 years ago.]

People who have heart disease and people who do not have heart disease fall within this same range. That is, their cholesterol has no bearing on whether or not they have heart disease, as proven by the Framingham Study, one of the largest studies ever done on cholesterol. Other studies have confirmed this fact.

Nevertheless, the threshold for what is considered high cholesterol has been progressively lowered, each time without scientific evidence to support the lowering of the threshold. Of course, each time the threshold is lowered, millions more people become eligible for cholesterol-lowering medications—massively increasing the market size for the drugs and increasing the profits for pharmaceutical companies. 

I say, leave your cholesterol alone. Don’t mess with Mother Nature!

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.

Interoception: our sixth sense

In addition to our senses of sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch—which convey information from the outside world to our brains—we have a sixth sense, called interoception, that conveys information from inside our bodies to our brains.

We have a network of nerves in our internal organs that are continually humming away, sending messages to our brains, mostly beyond our conscious awareness. In this way, our brains get a picture of what’s happening in our bodies, including our emotions, our behavior, our decisions, and even the way we feel sick. (The new weight-loss drugs, such as Ozempic, mimic the signals that the gut sends to the brain, telling it that you’ve had enough to eat.)

Our brains use the information to make a steady stream of adjustments to our bodies. For example, if your brain senses signs of infection, it fights back by raising your temperature. Our brains can even anticipate illnesses that have yet to start. Just the sight of a sick person can be enough to prompt your brain to ramp up your immune system.

With new tools at their disposal, scientists have launched a major new effort to map interoception. In so doing, they’ve found evidence that it may be the cause of many psychiatric conditions ranging from anxiety to schizophrenia. In studying people with such conditions, they’ve found unusual activity in the mid-insular region of these people’s brains—a region that is essential to interpreting signals from the body. The researchers postulate that the brains of this group are misinterpreting signals from the body—or that the signals themselves are faulty—resulting in commands that cause harm.

A group of scientists are currently running a trial in which they deliver low-frequency waves to the mid-insula of patients with psychiatric disorders, hoping to see if the region can be coaxed into responding to interoception in a healthier way. I’d sure like to know how this turns out!

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.