Summary:
Cardiovascular disease is this nation's #1 killer claiming 954,720 lives each year. No one group is singled out. It equally strikes men and women of all racial and ethnic groups. Cardiovascular disease kills more people than cancer, accidents, & AIDS combined! (American Heart Association 1994 data: cancer: 536,860, accidents: 90,140, and HIV / AIDS: 41,930.)

Here's frightening thought:
The deaths from cardiovascular disease do not include the deaths from heart disease, which claim an additional 487,490 lives. Cardiovascular disease and heart disease increase the risks of heart attacks and strokes.

Few realize that 25% of those dying from cardiovascular or heart disease don't suffer from any of the known high risk factors.

• high LDL or high bad cholesterol levels
• high blood pressure
• smoking
• or obesity

Who suffers from these diseases:
Combining cardiovascular and heart disease, we lose a 125,000 lives every month. These lives belong to our family, friends, people we work with, people we know, people we've met. To give some perspective, this year 1 in every 165 people American will suffer a heart attack or a stroke!

This section of the website is dedicated to 3 people we were able to call friends. All three died too early in life from either cardiovascular or heart disease. One smoked, but none of them had high blood pressure, none had high LDL bad cholesterol levels, and none of them were overweight.

What killed them? and what's killing the other 25% of the people dying from these diseases? To think 25% of those dying from these diseases don't have the common treatable high risk factor symptoms. After 30 years of research, medical science is still unable to identify the cause(s) of these diseases. The have successfully mapped out their advancing stages (See the section called the events leading to a heart attack.)

The last 25 years:
Today, nine million people, or about 5% of America's adult population take bad cholesterol-lowering drugs. These numbers grow everyday as the U.S. population grows older. People take these drugs in a hope of preventing heart attacks or strokes. Over 25 years ago, clinical research found that high levels of LDL bad cholesterol in the blood significantly increased the risks of heart attacks and strokes.

Medical science and public education has cut the heart attack rate in half over the past 25 years. At the same time, LDL bad cholesterol levels have decreased by only 10%. A 50% drop in heart attacks is associated with a 10% drop in the LDL bad cholesterol levels. Those numbers are too good to be true.

If the relationship is so strong, the decrease in LDL levels should equal the decrease in heart attacks. But they don't. Today, medical science is admitting that they don't know why there is such a large gap. They are slow to admit that American doctors should not limit their treatments to high blood pressure, high cholesterol, smoking and obesity.

The American Medical Association (AMA) reviewed the methods American doctors were using to treat these diseases. The AMA was looking for new cardiovascular and heart disease treatments that work. What they found was a tragedy. The Journal of the American Medical Association reported that women in the U.S. are often misdiagnosed, mistreated and receive inferior care for cardiovascular and heart disease. This was true regardless of the doctor's gender.

For example, When the severity of "cholesterol induced" heart disease was equal among men and women, only 1 woman for every 10 men received the same cholesterol lowering therapy. For more about this subject see the section called women face a greater risk of heart attack (heart attack 3)

What's killing the other 25%?
If those dying from the disease do not have any of the high risk factor conditions, then what's killing the other 25% of the people? The AHA knows that over 31,000 people will die this month from these diseases, when none of the known hazards are present.

• If you want to know what the greatest medical minds are working on -- look where they are spending their time.

An abundance of new research is focused on an amino acid called homocysteine (pronounced: HO mo SIS teen.) Studies have proven homocysteines are directly involved in destroying the body's arteries (blood vessels.)

• High homocysteine levels in the blood play as damaging a role in heart disease and cardiovascular disease as smoking or cholesterol.

Harvard University Medical School

Even after saying that, most health insurance plans don't cover the blood test costs that check for homocysteines. For a full discussion of the subject, see the section called NADH lowers high homocysteine levels.

. . . cardiovascular disease 2, continued on the next page