Homocysteine levels ARE important....

Today's post: Friday, 5-9-2008

Recent research has found that excessive levels of homocysteine in your blood tend to cause vascular disease & plaque build up and possibly inflammation in your blood vessels & it also may harm the health of the endothelium that is the inner lining of your blood vessels.

Very high levels of 14 or more are predictive of increase risk of death from all causes & from heart attacks. They are in fact MORE predictive than most other risk measures.

And, levels of 9.0 & up, once thought to be “normal” because they were so common, are enough to cause cardiovascular disease including age related mental decline from the cardiovascular disease & may possibly help cause other forms of senility, including Alzheimer’s disease. Such levels also increase your rate of aging.

So a study reported recently saying in that the results suggest that lowering high homocysteine did nothing to protect women from heart trouble is quite likely to be coming to an incorrect conclusion.

“B vitamins fail to cut heart risk in study

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Giving B vitamins and folic acid supplements to reduce high levels of a blood protein that is a marker for heart disease did nothing to protect women from heart trouble, according to a study released on Tuesday.” (5-6-2008)

There are two reasons for this for this finding & why they did NOT find that lowering high homocysteine is protective.

Here’s a quote from that study:

“The volunteers, all women, were 42 or older at the start of the study and either considered at risk for heart disease or had already experienced heart problems.

Half the 5,442 participants took 2.5 milligrams of folic acid, 50 milligrams of Vitamin B6, and 1 milligram of vitamin B12 daily, while the rest took a placebo.

No harm came from the vitamins and homocysteine levels fell by nearly one-fifth in that group but there was no appreciable difference in the incidence of heart problems or heart-related deaths compared to the placebo group in the seven years.”

That quote means that ALL these women either had heart disease OR had dangerous readings on the other measures of cardiovascular risk --

such as high LDL cholesterol, low HDL cholesterol, high triglycerides, high blood pressure, smoking, &/or high blood sugar.

And, the women with existing heart disease likely also had dangerous readings on those other measures.

So they already had damaged cardiovascular systems AND other causes of cardiovascular disease besides homocysteine.

Such people as the women they studied quite commonly have homocysteine readings of 14.0 & up.

That means that virtually all of them still had homocysteine readings of well over 11.2 AFTER taking the B vitamins.

This means the researchers did NOT find that lowering homocysteine with B vitamins wasn’t protective.

They found these three things instead.:

1. If, after lowering high homocysteine levels with B vitamins, the reading is still over 9.0, to get to protective levels you also need to have people stop smoking, stop any exposure to second hand smoke, AND take the supplements NAC and TMG until you get the reading to 8.9 or below. Lowering a very high reading to a high reading is likely NOT protective enough,

2. It pays to measure homocysteine levels from age 30 on & lower high levels BEFORE damage is done to your blood vessels.

3. Lowering homocysteine levels DOES help but is not enough. You also have to measure & improve the other indicators & causes of cardiovascular disease to get real protection.

That’s why it is critical your health to NOT smoke, to exercise, avoid ingesting harmful foods & drinks, & eat right, AND eat the foods & take the supplements that keep your homocysteine AND your other heart risk measures in the desirable range.

In short, if you do too little too late to prevent heart disease, doing too little after the damage has been done won’t protect you.

But to then conclude people who have not yet been damaged needn’t bother with taking protective B vitamins or that lowering homocysteine does nothing protective when that was not done enough to get to safe levels nor the other risk factors addressed is sloppy & inaccurate science.

Unfortunately that is exactly what many lay people and, unfortunately some doctors, think such studies prove.

The other research proves they are drawing false conclusions.

I’m writing this post to help prevent you from being harmed by their mistake.

The right conclusions to protect your health are:

to measure your homocysteine every year or so & take action to bring it under 9.0 if it gets above that;

to follow the other good health practices & lifestyle;

and, to measure the other risk indicators when you measure your homocysteine and also take corrective action on any of those that go into the undesirable range.