CAN ATHEROSCLEROSIS BE REVERSED?

Apr
02
2009

The answer is that it can be, (and it will take the rest of this book to explain how) with a combination of sensible eating, exercise, a different lifestyle, drugs, and perhaps surgery. Yet it is important, in understanding how this can be done, to look at all the other contributors to angina, for cholesterol is not the only danger to angina sufferers.

Atheroma is the necessary background to most kinds of angina, but it is hardly ever the sole cause of the symptoms. In most angina sufferers, it is the combination of underlying atheroma with many other changes in the blood that causes the illness. For example, the blood may be more viscous (sticky) than normal, slowing the flow through the narrowed areas. It can be more likely than normal to clot. It can carry too little oxygen due to lung disease or anemia, or perhaps because the oxygen-carrying red cells are full of carbon monoxide instead. All of these possibilities can reduce the supply side of the equation.

Or there may be high blood pressure, which, by increasing the force of the heartbeat even at rest, increases the heart’s demand for oxygen and glucose, causing further imbalance to the supply-demand equation.

How all these changes can combine together to create angina, and how they can all be reversed, is explained later, but in order to understand them, it is first necessary to outline the components of healthy blood.