I find LDL-C and Apo-B numbers often don’t line up when they are low. In my case on 8-20-25:
Total Cholesterol = 103 mg/dL
HDL = 72 mg/dL
LDL = 13 mg/dL
TG = 94 mg/dL
Apo-B = 34 mg/dL
Apo-A = 181 mg/dL
Lp(a) < 7 nmol/L
Have you considered adding Bempedoic Acid and Ezetimibe? You can get them in a combo tablet very cheap from India.
Since you are concerned about and are tracking radiation exposure, keep in mind that both Astaxanthin and Melatonin are protective vs ionizing radiation. Astaxanthin 12mg daily is in my stack for this and other benefits. Melatonin 300mg an hour or 2 before radiation exposure is the suggested protective dosage.
Your lipid numbers are better than mine.
I’m 75 yo with CAC 287 (8/22) and 242 (6/24).
This summer I’ll redo either CAC or my 1st CTA.
What is your hsCRP ?
ApoB is 34 mg/dl. This is much better than many others in this situation. Plaque is normal at certain ages as we can see with the percentile.
Question is if it’s worth decreasing further. I wonder how that affects fat soluble vitamin absorption. Thomas Dayspring is comfortable with 30 mg/dl apoB at least and believes regression requires <40 mg/dl.
Just remember that if you lose the war against plaque, you can pull out the big guns and put in stents. These push the plaque into tissue walls and effectively neutralizes their threat.
Of course it’s always best to prevent plaque in the first place, but you’ve done everything you can.
They reduce the risk but not by 100%.
Continuing the discussion from Cardiovascular Health 2025:
Yes, not by 100%due to the fact there’s probably other troublesome plaque somewhere else in your system that could cause trouble. However stents can neutralize the plaque in specific, high risk areas.
Good idea. I do already use 5mg (half tablet) of Ezetimibe, along with Praluent (150mg, once a month) and now Lipitor 10mg/day and baby Aspirin every other day.
The main problem is I only started aggressively lowering my Cholesterol a year ago, after reading this thread. Prior to that I just took Lipitor 10mg/day for the previous 15 years (since age 50) as per my primary doctor which kept my LDL around 100 mg/dL.
My hsCRP fluctuates a bit, but are generally low. Here are my last 2 readings:
8-20-25 : 0.35 mg/L
10-21-25 : 1.05 mg/L
That is a great tip about taking 300mg melatonin, I will need to remember that the next time I get a CT scan.
You could do a half dose of Bempedoic Acid too (90mg). The benefit will be small but I think it’s worth it in your case. Keep fighting it!
Hi
I did a CCTA with Cleerly about 6 months ago. My calcium score about 15 years ago was 185 with 99% blockage of OM2. I just went about my life with statins, bempdoic acid, ezetimibe (sp), Nattokinase and Boluoke (thanks to you on this site). This time my om2 seems to be clear and no soft plaque!.
My question to you is about the reports with Heart flow. I was not at all happy with my reports with Cleerly. Dont get all the fancy graphics that the doctor has access to and shares the first time during debriefing. I got a two page written report outlining the various plaque burdens in the various vessels. How was your report just written material or some graphics showing the burdens. I may do Heart flow in 3 years. Let me know. Thank you Cheers
I admire the optimism in believing you can control everything, but I think this is a bit over-simplified, to be honest. There are a surprising number of ways to die, haha. You say you have no idea how you’d die of CVD. Let me give you some. It seems that you are really only talking about atherosclerotic diseases. And I agree, if you start early and look after lipoproteins and blood pressure, most of them are preventable, and soon Lp(a) will be too.
However, you could still have fatal arrhythmias, rheumatic heart diseases, cardiac amyloidosis, myocarditis (including from infections), valve dysfunctions, aortic aneurysms, aortic stenosis etc. And they are from no ‘fault’ of your own, and no diet, exercise or medications will prevent them.
And by the way, you can still have a myocardial infarction for reasons other than atherosclerosis. You can have coronary artery dissections (cause of almost half of MIs in women <50 actually), or artery spasms which choke off the blood supply. The latter can be induced by stress, trauma, etc.
The other thing is, bear in mind that you have something like 20,000 genes in your genome which code for proteins, plus a whole bunch of other regulatory regions (miRNAs, lncRNAs etc). We all have some risk factors for something, and we really don’t understand this stuff yet. For heart specifically you have a lot of options; whether it’s a particular variant of an ion channel (arrhythmia risk), lamin protein (cardiomyopathies), or susceptibility to various syndromes (broken heart syndrome, heart failure during/after pregnancy etc) which seem to hit people fairly randomly. And these are not simple genetic inheritances where if your parents lived to 90 then you’re fine. Oh, and let’s not forget the interactions between those variants, and the redundancies in the system, where you change one thing and a bunch of other things also change in response.
Anyway, I don’t want to be a massive downer, haha. And I think the positive attitude is great. But IMO, we still have a long way to go in making sure that everybody can reach 90 regardless of genes. I did run the numbers using UK data (Quantifying the low-hanging fruit of longevity - #22 by relaxedmeatball), and I reckoned that we could improve average male lifespan from current 78.6 years up to 87 years by addressing 7 simple risk factors (smoking, hypertension, exercise, lipids etc). If we all achieved optimal results, mathematically speaking the average could rise to 92.
A HUGE HAHAAHAAAAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA and not in a sarcastic way though, but a real one. So you give me 1000 reasons why I could be (or am) wrong saying that everyone can live to 90, and then in last sentence you say that based on science and data we can all live to 92??? HUH, What???. Thank you for backing my opinion (wildly based on common sense) with actual data and science, so clearly now it is not just my opinion, but it is scientifically explained also. LOL btw not arguing whatsoever, and you absolutely make fair and right points but everything you say seems to lead to my oversimplified version of it LOL. and the other CVD issues you quote are very true and valid, but I consider them defects and most of them have nothing to do with genes. The son of an old friend of mine just passed (two weeks ago) on his sleep at 25. Never drank even coffee let alone alcohol or take any drugs btw. apparently, he was born with a birth defect in his heart, I forgot what the doctors said exactly. It just so happened that no one in his family has ever passed away under 80 years old, except two of his cousins that died in car accidents (know the whole family we lived in same block for over five generations back home, very common in some parts of old Europe)
Hang on - that would be average which is a hell of a long way from “everyone”…
Heartflow included graphics in my report : see attached the pages with the graphics.
Thomas CCTA graphics.pdf (2.0 MB)
Thank you. Cheers
It depends how we look at it I think. If someone goes from having horrible lifestyle habits (always drinking, not sleeping, no exercise) to doing everything right, then that would certainly yield FAR greater than three years of added lifespan.
If someone lives pretty average, than I think it will be less additional years, but I still think it would be more than three
I don’t think HDL really matters that much if ApoB is low enough. That’s what Dayspring and others have said.
Right, that’s why I said “people on this board”. I assume most here don’t have horrible lifestyle, terrible diets, always drinking, barely sleeping, never exercising etc. Most such folks wouldn’t read this site, I reckon - of course I could be wrong.
Yea but what I mean is people who go from having terrible lifestyle habits to suddenly becoming a board member here and doing everything we do are going to increase their lifespan by more than three years given the trajectory they were going in before. But people who are living a moderate lifestyle may only live longer by closer to the three-year margin you mentioned
