WHY YOU SHOULD KNOW YOUR LDL PARTICLE NUMBER?

WE ARE SURVIVORS FROM THE MOMENT OF DIAGNOSIS

Laboratory testing plays a very important role in the detection, diagnosis and treatment of any disease in patients. Generally, 70% of the information needed for a correct diagnosis & health management is in your blood. This data is critical for not just treating the disease, but for wellness & prevention as well. An estimated 70% of all decisions on diagnosis & treatment, hospital admission & discharge of a patient are based on the outcome of laboratory investigations.

Did you know that your blood cells regenerate every 120 days? This allows you to quickly measure the progress you are making from lifestyle & nutritional modifications.

Approximately 41% of the people who experience a heart attack will die from it!

Cardiovascular disease is one of the most misdiagnosed and mistreated conditions in medicine; 50% of heart attack patients have normal HDL & LDL levels. That means we need to look beyond HDL/LDL levels.

The common misconception is that cholesterol is fat and the more you consume fat the higher your risk for heart diseases. Then, what is cholesterol? It is not technically a fat; in fact, cholesterol is fat-soluble while blood is mostly water. Cholesterol gets transported around the body in blood, carried by special proteins called lipoproteins. Based on their density, these lipoproteins are classified into two, viz., low-density lipoprotein (LDL) and high-density lipoprotein (HDL).

LDL-P is a much better predictor of heart disease!

But there is another important factor that gets ignored so often while measuring the cholesterol, the number of LDL particles or LDL-P. Actually, the number of LDL particles (i.e., LDL-P) is a much better predictor of heart disease risk than the amount of LDL cholesterol (LDL-C) or total cholesterol. The lower the particle number and the larger the particle size, the less risk you face.

The Car Analogy!

The following analogy will help you understand it better: 

Consider the lipoproteins as cars that carry the cholesterol and fats around your body, and the cholesterol and fats are like passengers in the cars. Historically, we were falsely led to believe that the number of passengers in the car (i.e. concentration of cholesterol in the LDL particle or LDL-C) is what is causing the development of heart disease, but actually, it is the number of cars or particles of cholesterol that is causing the real damage. 

The more cars you have on the road at one time, the more likely some of them “crash” into the fragile lining of the artery, leading to artery wall damage and other complications. So, it’s not the number of passengers (cholesterol) the cars are carrying is the real villain, but the number of cars on the highway. In other words, patients with high LDL cholesterol (LDL-C) and low LDL particle number (LDL-P) are not at high risk of heart disease.

So, how do you know your LDL-P number? You get it by undergoing a test called NMR LipoProfile.

Heart disease is a complex, multifactorial process. The likelihood that we’ll have a heart attack depends on numerous factors, including genetics, diet, lifestyle and living environment. And LDL-P is NOT the only risk factor that matters!

The more risk factors you have & the greater the level of each risk factor, the higher your chance of developing coronary heart disease

PUT A STOP TO IT BEFORE IT STOPS YOU!

Reference: https://chriskresser.com/the-diet-heart-myth-why-everyone-should-know-their-ldl-particle-number/