New Blood Test Predicts Risk of Heart Attack, Stroke With Twice Previous Accuracy (theguardian.com) 51
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Scientists have developed a blood test that can predict whether someone is at high risk of a heart attack, stroke, heart failure or dying from one of these conditions within the next four years. The test, which relies of measurements of proteins in the blood, has roughly twice the accuracy of existing risk scores. It could enable doctors to determine whether patients' existing medications are working or whether they need additional drugs to reduce their risk. It could also be used to hasten the development of new cardiovascular drugs by providing a faster means of assessing whether drug candidates are working during clinical trials. The test is already being used in four healthcare systems within the US and [...] it could be introduced to the UK in the near future.
[Researchers] used machine learning to analyze 5,000 proteins in blood plasma samples from 22,849 people and identify a signature of 27 proteins that could predict the four-year likelihood of heart attack, stroke, heart failure or death. When validated in 11,609 individuals, they found their model was roughly twice as good as existing risk scores, which use a person's age, sex, race, medical history, cholesterol and blood pressure to assess their likelihood of having a cardiovascular event. The results were published in Science Translational Medicine. Importantly, the test can also accurately assess risk in people who have previously had a heart attack or stroke, or have additional illnesses, and are taking drugs to reduce their risk, which is where existing risk prediction scores tend to fall down.
[Researchers] used machine learning to analyze 5,000 proteins in blood plasma samples from 22,849 people and identify a signature of 27 proteins that could predict the four-year likelihood of heart attack, stroke, heart failure or death. When validated in 11,609 individuals, they found their model was roughly twice as good as existing risk scores, which use a person's age, sex, race, medical history, cholesterol and blood pressure to assess their likelihood of having a cardiovascular event. The results were published in Science Translational Medicine. Importantly, the test can also accurately assess risk in people who have previously had a heart attack or stroke, or have additional illnesses, and are taking drugs to reduce their risk, which is where existing risk prediction scores tend to fall down.
I'm glad it's twice as accurate... (Score:1)
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Probably more accurate than my ins. co.'s tables. (Score:4, Interesting)
She was right. I never did straighten out my diet. I still weigh ~190 pounds, although I actually stand a couple inches shorter than the 5'7" I used to. I still smoke the same half pack a day of Lucky Strikes. I've moved on from good Scotch to good Irish Whiskey. I'm in hog-heaven now that marijuana is legal here. I'll admit I'm slowing down and I breath kinda funny, but that heart attack that heading my way? Apparently, it got lost somewhere, or maybe stuck in traffic. I dunno.
SO this test is probably vastly more accurate than that - I'll bet it's as accurate as they assert. Even if this test were to warn me of the danger, I suspect I would lack the simple clarity of viewpoint or strength of will to do anything meaningful with that knowledge.
YMMV.
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Statins are a scam IMO. So good for you.
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Statins are a scam IMO. So good for you.
Of course they are scam, the actual fix is fixing your lifestyle. The trouble is: if you're a doctor, see a patient with lipidogram that makes your hair stand on your neck, what do you do? You know that if you tell them to stop eating junk food it'd fix it, but they'll just nod, say "yes doctor" and go off, and you're going to see them again in 6 months and their bloodwork is going to be even worse. Because they nodded and yes-doctor-ed their way through your lecture, and after that, kept right on eating ju
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I beat high cholesterol through diet, WITHOUT statins. But it took a year of healthy eating for my blood numbers to get under the max cholesterol threshold. Not a fast journey, but now I don't have to worry about statins messing with my brain, or becoming dependent on taking them to live.
You are pickling your liver and ruining your lungs. I'd put those at a top priority before worrying about anything else. You might not die in a year, but your life will be shorter. (Also, assuming you fill out the paperwork
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Max cholesterol threshold... Like... what?
You want to watch your HDL and LDL ratio... threshold?? It's 2022. We're beyond demonizing cholesterol. Ask your doctor to get the hint...
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How is your exercise routine?
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If you had high blood pressure I could give you some advice that doctors don't usually think about (for example, doing high intensity aerobics will have a different effect than low intensity aerobics, try "Insanity").
Unfortunately I haven't looked at high cholesterol very much, but you should look at the situation more deeply. It is likely that if you do your own research, you can come to a deeper understanding of high cholesterol than a general practitioner doctor, and may find a good way to bring it under
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Some years ago I read an article (in the NEJM?) about three sisters in their 70 and 80, none of them had less than 600 cholesterol. The question was what does a doctor do for such people and the answer was nothing. Some people have the genes and biochemistry not to be bothered by pumping grease through their veins. Others, like a friend of mine, silted up by 50 and died of heart disease before they were 60.
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Re:Probably more accurate than my ins. co.'s table (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Probably more accurate than my ins. co.'s table (Score:5, Insightful)
My doctor assured me that if I didn't start taking drugs (statins), I had a >95% chance of suffering a significant cardiac event within seven years.
And we don't hear 20 people here telling us they had a fatal heart attack.
Same with Russian roulette. I never met anyone who lost.
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Re:Probably more accurate than my ins. co.'s table (Score:4, Insightful)
Smoking? Eating poorly? Overweight? Your chances of a heart attack are still enormous. And, again using probabilities, in about half of heart attacks out there, the first sign of a heart attack is death.
Re:Probably more accurate than my ins. co.'s table (Score:5, Interesting)
Medical practice does treat people like statistics. The outliers are not strictly statistical anomalies. Genetics are a huge component. If you have sodium-sensitive hypertension, you have to be careful how much salt you use. If you just have high blood pressure but don't have an issue eliminating sodium from your blood, you can eat as much salt as you want. Medicine treats both people the same because it's a statistical difference and not something they usually test for.
It's true that the person above doesn't know their true likelihood but you don't either.
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The outliers are not strictly statistical anomalies. Genetics are a huge component.
Those are not mutually exclusive. Genetics is a component, and it should be entered into the equation, but in the end everything is still statistics. For example, if you have a cancer gene, your risk of certain cancers may be up to 70%. That means if you smoke, drink, are morbidly obese, have a cancer gene, eat like crap, and live near a uranium mine, you may still die of old at in your 90s. That's just statistics. The reason medicine treats people like statistics is that EVERYTHING is statistics. Pic
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The problem is using very limited generalized statistics as if they're more than that. That's why I picked the sodium example. A large percentage of the population are being given bad advice. Usually, when sodium is reduced in food products, that is replaced with sugar or something worse. And you have people being told to eat something demonstrably less healthy just in case they have a very specific risk factor that can probably simply be measured.
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I stand by my main point - even with absolute foreknowledge, I doubt I have the mental ability to do what is necessary to change anything. Unfortunately (based on the number of people I've seen carrying oxygen bottles into the smoke break area at work), I don't think I'm alone.
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If the object is to enjoy life and you enjoy smoking, drinking, and junk food, you may be doing the rational thing. Dying at a relatively young age is not the worst thing that can happen.
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Oh, I get it. Because someone with all of their vaccines/boosters is probably taking care of their health in other ways as well. Bad statistics practice to do this, though. Causation/correlation.
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The other slashdotters will call you crazy and retarded. Their heads are burred in the sand and they'll ignore any evidence or studies you give them, despite the record number of football players and athletes who have come down with or died of serious heart conditions (some of which I document here if you want sources https://battlepenguin.com/poli... [battlepenguin.com]).
These drugs need to be pulled from the market.
Re:Could probably do it cheaper .. (Score:4, Insightful)
despite the record number of football players and athletes who have come down with or died of serious heart conditions (some of which I document here if you want sources https://battlepenguin.com/poli [battlepenguin.com]... [battlepenguin.com]).
I would agree that taking more vaccinations or boosters than necessary is a risk. But I would disagree that it's a greater risk than not taking them. Any cardiac or circulator issue related to the shots is down to the spike protein activating ACE2 receptors. There's this virus that replicates that also does that. Someone can have the virus before or after the shot but never get tested for it.
In all likelihood, there's a greater number of adverse cardiac events from people that had asymptomatic COVID infections than people who have had shots. Especially people who share a high viral load in close quarters like a locker room.
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99.98% survival rate if you're under 60. I don't see how any drug, especially ones that are this untested, with this made side-effects, are remotely comparable to just being able to survive COIVD. The natural immunity doesn't wane or require the constant boosters of these rushed to production, ineffective drugs.
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I wouldn't recommend statin drugs for anybody. Nor would I recommend against them. IANAD. NOBODY should consider my statements here in considering their own personal decisions, save for what they are - anecdotal evidence, not clinical evidence.
I didn't think I needed to post a disclaimer.
Testing done in my circles ... (Score:2)
The ones with the largest number of Magic: The Gathering cards and Warhammer minis are the guys we worry about the most.
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When I was a MTG tournament I saw the fattest dude I ever saw in my life. It's fine, the guy was alright, he annihilated me of course. But I felt concerned for him.
Ignorance is spectacular (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone that has had a heart attack despite not being in a high risk category according to the metrics currently being used, I have spent countless hours reading about the real facts behind heart disease. I'm not interested in anecdotal stories where people say things like my grandmother smoked 40 a day and lived to 101, those are just stupid. People that quote those kinds of stories are simply trying to justify their poor life choices by finding the examples that fall outside the norm. Either that or they simply don't understand how statistics and chance work.
I'm also not interested in unproven remedies that claim certain changes to diet or lifestyle make a difference unless there is empirical evidence to prove it.
I was 49 when I had my heart attack, my HDL cholesterol was slightly higher than the recommended level, but not so high that my doctor was concerned about it. Using the BMI scale, I was overweight but not obese, not a smoker, and hardly drink alcohol. Most importantly, my diet seemed reasonable, not high fat and reasonably balanced.
What I have discovered is...
Yes cholesterol is an important part of cardiovascular health and statins can lower it significantly, not only that but keeping cholesterol levels low enough can actually result in partial reversal of the plaque buildup in the artery walls. What is rubbish though is the war on fat in the diet, especially when many 'low fat' foods substitute sugar for fat! Particular saturated fats like palm oil have been shown to increase cholesterol but there is very little evidence to show the sort of fats found in meat for example cause elevated cholesterol. In fact some fats help lower cholesterol, so the message that fat is bad is not helpful. In fact with the 'heath-food' movement promoting plant based foods things are getting worse not better as these foods are typically highly processed and contain things like palm oil to achieve the desired texture.
No salt is not evil, the war on salt is utterly ridiculous. The majority of people show little or no change in blood pressure in response to salt intake. In fact the research was conducted on rats that were fed diets that were so high in salt that quite frankly I'm surprised they didn't die from it, and yet they showed a small increase in blood pressure. I'm not saying that there are not people that are sensitive to salt, there may be a small minority that are but that can easily be established through observation of blood pressure in relation to salt intake.
Refined sugar is the worst possible thing you can have in your diet, the high glycemic index creates an inflammatory in the body. The plaque buildup in arteries is a product of an inflammatory process. Macrophages attack the cholesterol that has embedded in the walls of the arteries causing calcium deposits, the so called hardening of arteries. Sugar accelerates this causing massive inflammation that results in rupturing of the artery wall and the resulting formation of a clot that blocks the blood flow. Sugar is also far more influential in weight gain than fat, being overweight is one of the biggest factors in heart disease, people who are type 2 diabetics usually suffer heart disease due to these factors.
Exercise doesn't really help with weight loss, but does make a remarkable difference to both the development of heart disease and subsequent recovery after a heart attack. Most of us live quite sedentary lifestyles, working at a desk all day and driving wherever we go. Exercise does not need to be strenuous to be helpful, something as simple as walking a dog each day is enough to make a significant difference to your health.
Bottom line, reduce your intake of refined sugar and get off your backside a bit more if you want to avoid a heart attack.
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Amen.
I am glad you figured it out. In my opinion however, it is futile to try changing other people's minds. The propaganda against meat and salt is too strong, has been going for far too long. The science behind it is fraudulent, while being presented as honest. Starting from the original "study" of Keynes.
Sixty plus years the west follows the high carb, low fat scam. Fatefully. The result is unpreceded number of metabolic disease, both in absolute and relative terms. But the problem is fat. And cholestero
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Exercise doesn't really help with weight loss
At the levels most people exercise, sure. However, you never see fat professional marathon runners, soccer players, or cyclists, do you? It's a function of how much time you put in. If you're not working on getting slim, you're working on getting not slim.
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Exercise doesn't really help with weight loss
At the levels most people exercise, sure. However, you never see fat professional marathon runners, soccer players, or cyclists, do you? It's a function of how much time you put in. If you're not working on getting slim, you're working on getting not slim.
You never do. But it's because professional sportspeople also get their diet together, not because sports (even at professional level) is an effective way of weight loss. You can run all you want, but all it does is lower your blood sugar, which just makes you hungrier later, and the extra food you'll eat as a result compensates for the calories you've burned. Often overcompensates actually. So no, there's no way you'll get slimmer unless you get comfortable with that feeling of really wanting to put a doug
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In my experience running is a very effective weight loss / weight control strategy, but only if you *Run*.
I'm talking 1 hour+ per day, at a pace of 10 mph or better (6 minute miles). You do that and you can eat whatever the heck you want - you ain't gaining weight.
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However, you never see fat professional marathon runners, soccer players, or cyclists, do you?
The problems with a high carbohydrate are mostly eliminated if you burn all of it before it gets stored.
If you're not a professional athlete, most of your time is going to a different profession and you'll never have the same amount of time available to hit it with just activity.
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> Refined sugar is the worst possible thing you can have in your diet, the high glycemic index creates an inflammatory in the body.
EXACTLY! The media constantly lying about Adkins was so pathetic. Had American continued to push low-carb diets in the mid-2000s, we might have seen a massive reduction in heart disease. Sugar and starch are the worst thing for humans, and we have so much of it in everything! Way more than we had 50~80 years ago. It's the biggest factor in overall health.
That's why we're seei
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Animal derived proteins by any chance? (Score:2)
I do honestly wonder if with any of the proteins that they found a correlation with are the result of ingesting lots of animal protein.
If so then there might be a way to
investigate what appears to be a link to red meat consumprion and heart disease. And thus, ways to reduce those risks.
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Red meat is higher in trans fats than other meats and only artificial trans fats get demonized. Red meat is fine if it's not your only meat and you're not eating too many carbohydrates. Trans fats, like sugar, increase bad cholesterol.
You need a test for that? (Score:2)
If somebody is in this bad a condition, it should be pretty obvious...
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