Now here’s the danger: When any fluid gets too thick and the pressure gets too high, it can damage the sides of the pipe it flows in. And in the case of blood, the pipes getting damaged are your arteries.

Date:   2/27/2008 9:10:14 AM ( 16 y ago)

The Hidden Heart Attack Trigger

  BY ROBERT J. ROWEN, MD,

I’m sure you’ve known someone who died of a heart attack suddenly and without warning. One day they seemed the picture of health. The next day they were gone, leaving behind bereaved spouses and children.

Sadly, this is quite common. In fact, of the half million Americans who die of a heart attack every year, almost half of them have none of the classic warning signs.

That’s right. Half the people who die of heart disease have no high blood pressure… no high cholesterol…no previous heart problems.

That means that you can go to the doctor and get great scores on all the traditional tests and still drop dead the next day.

Yet despite all the evidence that these tests are unreliable, doctors continue to rely on them. They check your cholesterol and triglycerides. They look at your blood pressure and weight and whether you smoke. If they’re really thorough, they may even check your homocysteine and C-reactive protein levels.

But there’s one important thing they’re not testing you for. And the latest research shows that this one thing is the most important risk factor of all!

Why? Because all the other factors, like blood pressure, LDL, and fibrinogen, are merely symptoms of this one factor!

So what is this risk factor? It’s…

...blood viscosity.

That’s right, viscosity. The thickness of your blood. I know it sounds unbelievable that your heart-attack risk could be reduced to something so simple, but please let me explain.

To understand blood viscosity, consider the difference in thickness between water and ketchup. If you turn a bottle of water over, it just flows out. But if you turn ketchup over, it hardly moves. To get it to move, you have to put pressure on it by squeezing the bottle.

Well, blood works in much the same way. To get it to move, you need to put pressure on it. Pressure that’s provided by the contractions of your heart and blood vessels.

Now here’s the danger: When any fluid gets too thick and the pressure gets too high, it can damage the sides of the pipe it flows in. And in the case of blood, the pipes getting damaged are your arteries.

Most artery damage occurs at branching of the blood vessels. If this damage were merely due to some lab value, like cholesterol or homocysteine, you’d expect it to be fairly constant throughout the blood vessels. But it’s not. Why? Because this damage is caused by the pressure and friction of thick blood flowing through these branched areas.

What happens is that the thick blood creates friction, which erodes the inner lining of the artery. To protect itself from this erosion, the artery patches itself up with plaque. But this narrows the artery… which increases the pressure… which leads to more injury… and so on. It’s a vicious cycle.

Now let’s look at some of the other risk factors known to contribute to heart disease. You’ll find that all seven are related to blood viscosity…

1) Cholesterol: High LDL cholesterol increases blood viscosity, while high HDL thins the blood.

2) Smoking: Thickens the blood by increasing fibrinogen and inflammation.

3) Diabetes: Makes red blood cells stiffer. And red-cell stiffness makes blood thicker.

4) Blood pressure: As I mentioned, when blood is thicker, you need more pressure to move it. More pressure results in more friction and more injury to the arteries.

5) Obesity: Increases blood viscosity and fibrinogen. It’s a known fact that when you lose weight, your viscosity and fibrinogen drop.

6) Gender: Pre-menopausal women have a much lower rate of heart disease than men. Why? Because menstruation thins the blood. After menopause, when menstruation ceases, the risk for men and women is equal.

7) Blood count and age: Young red blood cells fresh out of the bone marrow are soft and flexible. But as cells age, they incur damage, which does to red blood cells what it does to your joints: it makes them stiffer.

Eventually, the oldest, stiffest red blood cells are taken out and recycled in your spleen. But until then, they are very stiff and have trouble going through the capillaries. So a higher pressure is needed to drive them through.

Women are protected from this during menstruation. Why? Because every month they lose blood, leading the bone marrow to churn out lots of young, flexible cells to replace what is lost. Result: blood that flows smoothly.

But at menopause, this all stops. So older, stiffer blood cells circulate through the blood vessels. And heart-attack risk skyrockets!

By the way, the conventional wisdom is that postmenopausal women’s risk is due to the fact that they accumulate too much iron in the blood. The problem with this theory is that it can take years for iron to accumulate. In contrast, red blood stiffness takes just a few months.

 

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