Do you Know The Hidden Killer in YOUR Arteries?
Dr. John Osborne explains why EKGs and stress tests miss heart disease, and why a cardiac CT scan with AI analysis can detect plaque buildup before a heart attack. High blood pressure, poor diet, and smoking make blood vessels sticky, allowing cholesterol to form dangerous plaque that traditional tests overlook.
Chapters
You didn't go to seek clear cardio. You have your heart attack, you survive. I like to say you're in the top half of the class because the bottom half of the class just died.
Hold on, hold on. Let's just touch base on that. So what you're saying is, what you're telling our listeners is that half of the folks, roughly half of everybody who has a heart attack or a stroke dies?
Yeah.
Like with no symptom?
No, no preceding symptom.
Wow.
Till you died.
That was your symptom? Death? Yeah. Okay, we'll get back to that in a minute. All right, keep going.
Right.
Yeah. So welcome to Clear Cardio's Prevention is Power podcast, the podcast where we get real about your health, your future, and the steps you can take to live a longer, healthier life. I'm JD Enright, founder of Clear Cardio, and today we're tackling one of the biggest killers of our time, heart attacks and strokes. The plaque doesn't build up on the inside of your arteries, right? It builds up somewhere else, doesn't it?
But what happens is the vessels get sticky.
Okay, because of the high blood pressure.
Because high blood pressure and other things. Yeah. Which we'll talk about.
Genetics, right?
Genetics, wrong choices.
Yeah.
Bad diet.
Got it.
Diabetes, smoking.
All those risks that you read on those pamphlets.
Exactly right.
Yeah.
A lot of those Why they are a risk is they give you sticky vessels, right? Got it.
There you go.
Sticky vessels. You don't want sticky vessels.
Yeah. So those are risks that cause something that allows the plaque to—
Exactly. So they get sticky. And what happens is cholesterol, which is the culprit 100% of the time, okay, that forms plaque 100% of the time. There is no such thing as plaque that forms in the absence of cholesterol. As it turns out, there's not good cholesterol or cholesterol. There's just cholesterol.
Okay.
Right?
Really?
Yeah.
Because I always heard there's bad cholesterol, which is LDL, and there's good cholesterol, which is something else.
LDL, for the audience, right? Lousy lethal.
Okay.
We want that low.
Okay.
Right? And we used to think— this has really been disproven over the last 10 or 15 years, but the myth is still out there— that another form of cholesterol, and it's all about the density of the cholesterol. We have less dense cholesterol, LDL, less dense, lower density LDL, lower density lipoprotein. And we have higher density lipoprotein, HDL.
Oh, so that's what that means.
Yeah. HDL stands for high density lipoprotein.
Lipoprotein.
LDL is low density lipoprotein. So it's the high density lipoprotein that to be good and protective, and in fact actually would, would do what we call reverse cholesterol transport, right? Because you go, well, if there's a pathway in, there should be some kind of pathway out. So the idea behind HDL cholesterol, yeah, is that that would be the pathway out.
Right.
So if we start putting cholesterol, depositing cholesterol in our blood vessels, which is never good, then HDL was our savior. It's the happy, healthy Heavenly cholesterol that should be high. All that's incorrect, but you thought so. You thought so, but we used to think of it that way. But you brought up good cholesterol.
Nobody's talking about that.
Yeah, I know. Well, we are here. We are here, and keep listening.
You've heard it first right here from John Osborne.
Lots and lots of surprises coming. Okay, by the way, everything you thought about heart was wrong, but keep listening. So yeah, so HDL cholesterol. Is, is not helpful.
Explain to, to our audience what, what is it now that we are driving to be the standard of care? How does it change?
Yeah, so I think if, if you followed this at all, you'd say, well, let's detect those polyps before you get the cancer.
The plaque in our case. Yeah, right.
Polyps. Cancer being the heart attack, right? Yeah. So We clearly illustrated blood testing, not going to tell you. Might give you an idea of risk, but risk is not disease. EKGs, pretty much useless. Stress tests, pretty useless. In fact, can miss stuff and overcall stuff, right? And even the, quote, gold standard heart catheterization that's been around for 70 years, right? So how many people use a rotary phone these days?
Nobody I know of.
Punch phone?
Nobody I know of.
Yeah, well, we're still using rotary phones in the world of cardiology.
Interesting correlations.
Right? So we, we don't use 1950s technology on a routine basis, right? I mean, no one would put up for it.
We being society.
I get it.
Yes, yes.
Yet for the things we've been talking about— stress tests, heart cath, EKGs— They're all mid-century, 20th century technology. So with tools that we use now, cardiac CT and the AI analysis that generates all of this analysis, and this is just the, again, the tip of the iceberg. We can quantify this, we can measure exactly how much plaque, we can monitor it. We'll get into all that later. This is the standard of care. All right, so my standard of care.
So one of our—
our standard.
Yeah, one of our viewers comes in and says, hey, Dr. Osborne, you know, I want to come in and I want the new standard of care. I want the Cleer Cardio standard of care. What are you going to tell them? What are you going to tell me? What is it that we do? I walk in, shake your hand, what happens next? So what's the process?
The critical leverage of our technology is something that's been around Admittedly, and I started doing this almost 25 years ago now, and it really—
Oh wow, it's been a while.
Yeah, so it was cardiac CT.
But you were the only one doing it, right?
Yeah, I mean, I had to teach myself.
You and 3 other people.
Yeah, so yeah, I mean, you know, somebody's gotta start, right? Start it, right? Yeah. So I had the concept of what we could do. Technology evolved to the point where we had very crude machines to do what we call cardiac CT. So by the way, when I say cardiac CT, a CT scanner, computed tomography scanner, is what probably most of you may have heard, or many of you may have had one, maybe not necessarily for the heart, but it's just a big donut, okay, that we can put you in the middle of it. I want to differentiate that it is not an MRI. So MRI is more the coffin, right? I'm going to stick you in this thing and It's going to completely surround you and it's pretty claustrophobic. A CAT scanner—
I hate those because you get claustrophobic.
Exactly.
This far away from your face.
CAT scanner's quite open, right?
Yeah, you're like this.
It's a big donut, but it's open. You can see out the other side and all that stuff. But what the CAT scanner does is basically, particularly the latest versions of those, of which we have the incredible luxury and fortune to be able to use just cutting-edge cardiac CT, That has evolved just like our iPhones from iPhone 1 20 years ago to iPhone 16 nowadays.
I think they have 17 out there now.
Yeah, yeah, it's coming.
Coming. Yeah.
Yep. So we do it with a CAT scanner. We put an IV in the arm.
We give you— Pretty non-invasive stuff.
Pretty non-invasive, right? And then we walk you down to the CAT scanner. You get in the CAT scanner, uh, we position you in the CAT scanner. How much does it take? Uh, I would say from the time you're on the table to done, maybe 10 minutes.
Oh boy, okay, that's nothing. That's fast.
And I can scan you at one point, tell you exactly where you stand, how much plaque, where it's located, where the blockages are, how much plaque there is in the whole heart, in each vessel, in each segment, how much soft plaque is, hard plaque, Right? Then we can treat you, do whatever we need to think would be appropriate for you. And this is where the personalization comes into play, right? You know, everybody's going to be different how we attack the plaque and stop the plaque and reverse the plaque.
Exactly.
Then we can, down the road, do another scan and see not only are the numbers better, my cholesterol's better, I'm feeling better, my exercise capacity is better, my blood pressure's better. Oh, that's great. But we can now see the first libido, right?
I saw an improvement there.
Well, and honest to remember, blood vessels go to lots of places, not just the heart. Yeah, right.
That's right.
Yeah.
You know, the anxiety of not knowing was really stressful and caused unnecessary anxiety because I really wasn't getting the answers. And it wasn't until I went through this process of knowing. And again, like I mentioned, I wasn't happy to hear that I had heart disease, arteriosclerosis. But what gave me the strength and made me relax a lot, like, oh, kind of like just slumped over. I remember just, I actually cried a little bit when I came home to my wife and I was like showing her. And, but I was so, I was so relieved to know one way or the other. But then you told me there's a way to reverse it. Like it wasn't hopeless, right? There's, there's a cure and we can get, we can get it no matter how far along you are. Once you know where, how much, what kind, and it's personalized to you, it's not that broad stroke.
Right.
For me, that was kind of like, and I'm getting a little emotional right now, that was the process from which I could start on. It wasn't like hopeless. And so thank you for that, Dr. Osborne.
And, and that's why I do what I do.
Yeah.
Right? To make a difference.
That's right.
