5 Advanced cholesterol markers your MD will not run, but you need to know!

"A new national study has shown that nearly 75 percent of patients hospitalized for a heart attack had cholesterol levels that would indicate they were not at high risk for a cardiovascular event, based on current national cholesterol guidelines."

Heart attacks are terrible, that’s no secret. In fact, one person in the United States dies from heart disease every 34 seconds. Nearly 75% of all patients hospitalized for heart attacks had cholesterol levels that would not indicate high risk of cardiovascular events.

The good news is there are a lot of steps you can take to avoid them. In this article we will look at my top five labs you can get done to measure your heart health, and determine if there are any steps you need to take to prevent heart attacks and other cardiovascular conditions.

These five labs will give you an idea of your entire cardiovascular system’s health. Unfortunately, they are not always performed by doctors in the conventional system. If you would like to get any (or all) of these tests done, please do not hesitate to reach out.

All of these tests are very important, but I want you to pay special attention to the final three.

Test 1: Fasting Insulin Levels

A healthy reading for a fasting insulin level is between 2.6 to 24.9. I prefer to see patients with insulin levels around 5. Insulin serves a purpose in the body, but high levels of it act like microscopic shards of glass flowing all through your system. This causes a high level of inflammation, which puts you at a much greater risk.

Test 2: Homocysteine

Homocysteine is a marker of high inflammation in the brain, and high readings are common in people with conditions such as Alzheimer’s. These high readings can also lead to cardiovascular events.

Typically lab readings from 0 to 14.5 are considered “normal,” but I prefer to see a healthy range from 5-6.

Test 3: LDL Particle Number

Many doctors in the conventional system look at high LDL and cholesterol levels and will automatically prescribe medication. More recent medical studies show this treatment has a much lower impact than we previously believed.

That is not to say that LDL and cholesterols are never the “bad guy” in your health. On the contrary, they can lead to poor heart health. It is simply a much more complex situation than we used to believe.

I recommend the NMR LipoProfile test. This specific test looks at the number of particles in your bloodstream. In a perfect world, we would see your particle number lower than 1,000. Higher levels of particles in your stream is directly connected to poor heart health.

Testing for the number of particles is important because LDL particles can vary in size. Large LDL particles can have the same volume of LDL in your system as smaller particles, but there will be fewer of them.

Having very few, large sized LDL particles puts you at significantly lower risk than someone with the same volume of LDL with small particles.

Test 4: LDL Size

It turns out that size does matter! At least when it comes to the size of LDL particles in your system.

This test will actually measure the size of your LDL particles. Large particles are nice and “fluffy,” and therefore cause significantly less damage to your cardiovascular system. Small LDL particles are the opposite.