Episode 14: CIMT Scans - The Link to Age Reversal?

Welcome to Inside the Cure with Dr. Charles Moak from Allure Medical. Learn what it takes to cure diseases, not just manage their symptoms. Healthcare isn't going to save itself, so let's jump right in.

Today we're going to talk about picking up disease before it actually occurs. Healthcare and health insurance, really you could think of as disease care and disease insurance. So when you get in a car accident or you get sick or you have a heart attack or a stroke or cancer, your insurance pays for being put in the hospital. Medications are needed. And when you get a disease such as diabetes or, say, heart disease or cancer, they'll pay for the medications used to treat it. And in some cases, they'll pay for very limited screening tests, like they pay for mammograms or prostate exams. They'll pay for some stress test if you're symptomatic, but not if you're not symptomatic. Stress tests will pick up heart disease to pay for cholesterol if there's a medical indication, a blood test. But how accurate are these really at picking up disease years in advance? And I want to talk to you about cardiovascular disease. One of the big three things that are putting your life at risk. The big three ones, the three things that would put your life and your health span at risk would be your neurocognitive status. Do you have neurocognitive decline, such as Alzheimer's or dementia? Or at your risk of it, would you want to find out 10 years before you get it and do something to stop it? Or maybe just let it happen and then not be aware There's a solution? Cancer. Can we pick up cancers in advance? Well, we know we can for colon cancer and breast cancer, possibly prostate cancer, skin cancer by doing certain screening tests. Cervical cancer. But in general, many cancers are missed because it's just too late. I'm not going to talk about that. They're too late when they show up. I'm not going to talk about that right now. I'm going to talk about cardiovascular disease. So cardiovascular disease is a whole consortium of heart attacks, strokes, peripheral artery disease. Peripheral artery disease, that's where the circulation doesn't get down your feet. Hypertension and like chest pain or angina, something that occurs before a heart attack. And we've all known somebody had a heart attack and they didn't know it was coming. I have two friends that had bypass surgery in the past year, and they had no idea they're at risk for it. They had seen their doctor and maybe were put on cholesterol medicines or maybe were not, maybe put on blood pressure medicines, maybe we're not. But they didn't know they had an impending heart attack coming until they wound up, you know, almost dying. So how can we pick that up in advance? Well, there's two tests right now that are pretty accurate for predicting future cardiac events. Now there's some blood tests that are somewhat helpful. Cholesterol levels, certain inflammatory markers. But there's tests that you can see if you actually have disease in your cardiovascular system. And the first one that was really popularized was a CAT scan. A CAT scan is a type of X ray that had what's called a calcium score. And the calcium score, they would do a CAT scan of the heart. It only takes a couple seconds, very inexpensive, less than $100 typically. And see if you have calcium deposits in your heart. And if there's calcium deposits, based on your age, how many do you have? They can rate you compared to other people in your age group and say, do you have more disease than your average peer or less. The problem with the calcium score is, is the highest risk plaques or atherosclerosis in the heart are not calcified. Okay, so they're not calcified. And that's particularly true in African Americans and in women, regardless of race, the calcium score is more accurate in white males, but less accurate in other races or sexes. So that leaves a problem. The other thing is with calcium score is you can't track to see if you're getting better or not. So when somebody has some plaques in their arteries, they discover it with a calcium score higher than they want to be for their age, and they go on a lipid lowering medications and lifestyle changes. What happens is a soft plaque turns into hard plaque, which actually increases the calcium score, even though the plaques are shrinking. So it really picks up hardened plaque. So that's the problem. The calcium score, I did one myself back in 2004. Fortunately, it was perfectly normal at that time. And, and I've done it since. And I have a little bit of calcium deposits. So that's one way you can check. The other way is called a cimt, a carotid intimal media thickness test. And this is an ultrasound done on the carotid arteries of the neck. And it turns out that the carotid artery of the neck is a good window into your entire cardiovascular system. They tried it in other areas, like on the radial pulse, which is in your wrist or the femoral artery in your groin. But the carotid artery is the best Indicator of whole body atherosclerosis or cardiovascular disease. And specifically there's two things they can look at with the carotid study. Number one is looking at the thickness of the lining of the wall. And every year it gets about 0.01 millimeters thicker. Every year it's about 0.01 millimeters thicker. And there's also something called plaques. This is monofil of things that are sticking into the lumen. It would be some cholesterol material and some hardening and some calcium. So those are two things we can look at. What's nice about the CIMT over the CT test is we can check for regression of cardiovascular disease, which we really can't effectively do with a CAT scan. We can also check very precisely with progression. And also it doesn't matter what your race is or what sex you are, it's progress. Pretty accurate. Now, different sexes, different races have different amounts of normals for their age. So I'll give you an example. A 50 percentile means the average white male that's 55 years old has a CIMT thickness of 0.664. A white female is 0.616, a black male is 724 and a black female is 0.6. So we look at this in relationship to other people of your own race and sex because that tracks progression of disease. Then additionally we can say, okay, so if you have a, you know, point, whatever, if you're a little higher than your age, can you take that backwards? So let's talk about what can happen. So there's certain interventions that we know that can actually reverse cardiovascular disease. And some are very hard to do and some are relatively easy. So what's, what's kind of hard to do? Well, it's been shown that eating a complete plant based diet with very low oil content reverses atherosclerosis. And that's been shown in numerous studies. That's relatively hard to do. Being a vegan is sort of challenging. I've done it myself on and off. Going on vegan, very low oil diet is really challenging. You really can't read a rest or anything, so that's a problem. But maybe eating more plant based food, if you have atherosclerosis, you should consider that you're gonna potentially reverse it. There was a Finnish study that showed that sauna use 20 minutes a day, three or four times a week, reduced cardiovascular risk. We don't know if it actually regresses cardiovascular disease, but it probably does. And there are certain botanicals supplements that have been shown specifically to reverse cardiovascular disease, to reverse atherosclerosis and shrink plaque burden. There's something called nattokinase and some other things that have been shown to reverse cardiovascular disease in clinical studies, particularly when looking at like the cimt, the carotid intermedia thickness. So let's take an example of a report. Let's say you're a black female that is 55 years old. In the average for a 55 year old African American female, CIMT thickness is 0.668. And if you get the study done and you're 0.668 or thereabouts, it'll resay you're at your chronological age, you're 55. But if your thickness is not 0.668, it's 0.75, you're actually at the chronological age of a 65 year old African American female. And if you're thick is 0.59, you're at the 50 percentile for a 45 year old African American female. So the report will say what is your cardiovascular age compared to your chronological age. And if you're a little bit older of cardiovascular age and your chronological age, you should take notice and realize that you're more risk of having a heart attack in the future than your peers and you can take some action to reverse it. Now, our nurse, Molly Landis, she's an rn, she got certified in what's called the Bael Doneen course or BAAL Doneen system. And this is a system that's proven to reduce the CIMT thickness over a period of years. And they had a study where they followed people for eight years and they saw for every year that they were on the program, their CIMT thickness regressed by 0.01. Now that's interesting. Normally it worsens by 0.01 per year. Well then they had a specific intervention based on their genetics and their blood work and their lifestyle, they were actually able to shave a year off every year that their age. That's very interesting. Can that be done repletely where they had a study with numerous people in it, about a ousand followed for eight years. That's pretty good evidence. There's also been numerous other studies showing just even in the short term, in about a year, we have some impact on shrinking the cimt. I told you I had a negative calcium score back in 2004. And then in 2018 I did it again. It was a little bit of a problem. I had a little bit more atherosclerosis than I would for my age and what happened in 2015 and 16, I had what's called a myelopathy. My, my spinal cord was getting crushed by my neck bone. I had arthritis, I didn't know it and it led to some atrial fibrillation and my something called homocysteine went up real high and my blood pressure was hard to control. I was just sick because of this cord issue. I was really sick. I was having a hard time walking, took a little time to figure out what it was. And I had surgery and took a while for my body to recover. And during that time I developed some cardiovascular disease because my spinal cord being injured, let go of my genetics that were really from my father. My dad had a bypass when he was 44 and a stroke when he was 45. So I've always watched it, always watched what I ate, tried to watch my cholesterol, which genetically just wants to be high. But it got out of control for a couple years and I developed some atherosclerosis. I did a CIMT score in 2019 April, and my thickness was that of a 58 year old man and I was 55 at the time. So it was about two and a half years older than my stated age, which concerned me. It wasn't severe, but it was a problem. Also had some small plaques. So I went on a two year. Well, I'm still on an intervention with. I bought saunas, put in my houses and I started taking supplements that were designed to reduce my inflammation and specifically attack the genetic aspects of my own personal cardiovascular disease, my own genetics. So we have what we call epigenetics. That's how we respond to our genetics. Our genetics are not the only thing. And up until 2015 I've really been fighting off aging. Well, in a two year period, my cardiovascular age went from 58 down to 44. I repeated that in two different machines at two different places, got the exact same results in August of 2021 and I was able to reduce my CIMT score from about 0.71 to 0.7 which represented a 14 year reversal. Add that on the fact I had aged 2 years, it's really a 16 year reversal cardiovascular disease. I had some small plaques which also regressed. My plan is to make them go away. And I did kind of everything in terms of dieting and exercise and got more strict about certain things. And I don't know if everybody wants to do the same thing. It's going to be all different. We customized. I want to do everything I could. And now I'm going to back off a little bit and be more laser focused now. I've reversed some disease that occurred. But the reality is that we can reverse cardiovascular age. It's been shown in numerous studies. And it's not going to be done through your standard health care. Your health insurance right now is not really equipped to handle some things that are coming down in science, which is reversing disease or reversing age. The FDA has acknowledged the fact that they think that there's no such thing as anti aging and they don't have a validated way to measure age other than what year where you're born. Now there's things called epigenetic clocks, telomere length, there's different things we can use to measure somebody's genetic age. But our cardiovascular age, we can compare ourselves to other people our age. And are we more advanced than they are or less advanced? And if we're a little bit more advanced, you're the one that's going to have a heart attack at a premature age. And what can you do to avoid that? Could my friends who had heart attacks and bypass surgeries in the past year have avoided them all? Science points to the answer. They could have put it off a long time. Maybe eventually they would have heart disease. But could we have put it off 20, 30 years? And the answer appears to be definitely we can do that. There's evidence that we can stop chronological age. I'm sorry, stop cardiovascular age and reverse it. And it's being done. So right now, you know, one thing simple to do is get us get a calcium score of your heart. If you're, if you're a white male, those are pretty accurate. And if it's a zero, you're fine, don't worry about it. If it's a little higher than your expected age, I would pursue it further. If you're. And it's really inexpensive, they're about 80 or 90 or $100. You can get them almost anywhere. The ultrasound is really what all I'm recommending to people right now. It's a little More expensive, about $250. Takes usually a week or two to get the results back on the outside. And it's pretty easy to do. It takes about 15 minutes. But you have to have a registered vascular tech to do the study and a physician who's registered and interpreting vascular ultrasound to read it. We have that ability only at our Shelby office and South Shelby Township office in Michigan. I might expand that down the road. Right now I'm thinking that you know, we do things to help people look and feel better on the outside, and we do things to help people feel better and look better on the inside. And one thing is identifying cardiovascular disease before it's too late, before it's too late and having intervention. And if you have, you know, if your CIMT score is 10 years younger than your chronological age, well, you've got great genetics and plus or minus your lifestyle. Keep doing what you're doing. But if your CIMT score is older than your age, what you're doing, it ain't working. And we need to make a change and we need to do some additional testing to find out why. Maybe look at your genetics or some of your specialized lipid studies to see what things are causing you to accelerate cardiovascular age and intervene and check it again in a year or so. I waited two years because I wanted to have a profound impact and a 16 year reversal in two years. I'm very happy with that. Bali is going to start working on rolling out a program for our customers that are for patients and clients that want to see if they can impact and reverse their cardiovascular age as well. And we're putting that together. I don't know exactly what it's going to look like ultimately, but these are the next steps of an anti aging practice. And anti aging is a word a lot of people don't like to use. They're afraid that, you know, anti aging means you live a little bit longer and you're frail. But in reality, if we're not having, if we're slowing down age, we're actually slowing down development of disease, which is the hallmark of aging. So frailty is associated with aging. And if we can stop things like cardiovascular disease, intervene before cancers occur, reduce your chance of neurocognitive decline. If you're at risk for it, you'll live a fuller life with a longer health span. So thank you very much.

Thanks for listening to Inside the Cure with Dr. Charles Moak. See you next time.