Very recently, I used our social media channels to share some alarming statistics about the dangers of ‘silent’ heart attacks – cardiac episodes so mild that they go unnoticed until the patient requires an ECG.
The statistics themselves are sobering enough – around 45% of all heart attacks are silent and their long-term effect on heart health can be significant, with a major and possibly fatal cardiac event more likely with each episode.
But they become alarming when you add in other considerations.
For example, four in every ten people admit they either avoid making an appointment with their GP to have a heart check-up, or make the appointment but then cancel it at the last minute.
Add to this the fact that heart checks aren’t a standard element of a routine NHS or GP check and you begin to see an emerging picture of increasing risk.
One of the statistics that surprises most of the clients we see at The Natural Doctor® is that 50% of all heart attack victims havenormal cholesterol levels. No-one is going to tell you that lowering cholesterol is a bad thing; but if you’re someone who thinks lowering cholesterol is the whole answer to tackling the health of your heart then you could be in for a nasty surprise.
For a great many people – and especially for men who are more naturally predisposed to heart conditions – what stops them going through with an appointment is that age-old process of knowledge breeding fear.
Knowledge in the sense that they might recognise their lifestyle puts them at exponentially greater risk or, perhaps, that there is a history of heart disease in their family. Fear in the sense of having their worst suspicions confirmed.
Perversely, for those people, not knowing they have a problem means there’s no problem to deal with. Which works – but only until their heart doesn’t.
In reality, of course, we’d all logically agree that knowing is the better option, whether there is an identified risk or not, because it gives us time to take the necessary steps to make the changes that need to be made to protect our hearts.
Here at The Natural Doctor®, our PULs cardiovascular risk assessment is designed to do exactly that: assess your risk of a serious cardiac event and then beginning the process of giving you and/or your GP the information you need to stop it from ever happening.
PULS stands for Protein Unstable Lesion Signature and the test measures the most clinically-significant protein biomarkers that are present in the blood of individuals with active Unstable Lesion formation.
Using these results and combining them with established clinical factors, we’re able to diagnose unstable cardiac lesion progression and the chance of rupture.
In other words, by measuring the health of heart tissue, it can detect the extent – if any – of an existing silent cardiac disease and then calculate the risk of a future cardiac event.
It’s more accurate than a routine check-up and it gives you and your health provider the very best information to help treat an existing condition and make whatever changes are needed – for example through nutrition or exercise of medication – to try to ensure the situation doesn’t get any worse.
It’s easy to live in the belief that as long as you’re showing no outward signs of a problem, all is well. And I understand that the prospect of possibly discovering the opposite is true can be scary. But suffering a major heart attack is scarier still – particularly when it might have been avoided if we’d just been that little bit braver.
There’s nothing to lose and everything to gain by signing up for a PULs cardiovascular risk assessment. By taking the test, you risk discovering you’re at risk. By not taking it, you risk much more.
Find out more about PULs and how I can help you to avoid a heart attack starting right now, visit our PULs treatment page
