Topic
Cardiovascular Risk
How the systems most likely to decide your lifespan actually break down: LDL and ApoB, blood pressure, the endothelium, coronary calcium, the dose-response math nobody teaches you.
13 articles
Is Your Mouthwash Increasing Your Blood Pressure?
Some mouthwashes shut down the tongue bacteria your body uses to make nitric oxide. What chlorhexidine does to blood pressure, and which rinse didn't.
What Keeps Plaque in Your Heart Arteries From Rupturing?
Is soft plaque dangerous? Whether a plaque ruptures depends on its fibrous cap, which no CT report measures. What thins it, and the trials where caps thickened.
I Finally Have the Diagnosis That Explains Years of Chest Pressure. It Wasn't Anxiety. It Was Never "All in My Head."
A stent didn't stop the episodes. Every scan said fine. The answer came from the one test I almost turned down.
I Crushed My ApoB to 38. Nobody Measured My Small Vessels.
Coronary microvascular dysfunction hides behind a clean angiogram. How it is diagnosed, why inflammation drives it, and why an ApoB of 38 was not enough.
The Heart Attacks You Never Feel
What happens when coronary plaque ruptures and heals instead of killing you: a silent wound that narrows the artery. It likely built my 80% blockage at 44.
The Plaque a Calcium Score Can't See
A calcium score only sees calcified plaque. Mine would have read zero with a severe soft-plaque blockage in place. What a 0 rules out, and what it doesn't.
I Trained Hard for 25 Years. I Was Measuring the Wrong Fitness.
VO2 max carries one of the strongest survival signals in medicine, with no ceiling found. I lifted five hours a week for 25 years and never measured mine once.
Blood Pressure Isn’t a Moment. It’s a Dose Your Arteries Absorb for Decades.
132/85 is now Stage 1 hypertension, and a single reading is one sample of a dose your arteries absorb every beat, for decades. Mine sat there for twenty years.
What Twenty Years of “Borderline” LDL Actually Costs You
An LDL of 145 at 35 isn’t a snapshot. It’s 2,175 mg-years of exposure your arteries have already logged, and “borderline” is the word that hides the bill.
I Was “Metabolically Healthy.” I Got a Stent at 44 Anyway.
Low hsCRP, flat CGM, no insulin resistance, LDL 150s on keto: every marker the low-carb world calls safe. Then a CT angiogram found an 80% blockage at 44.
I Was Doing Almost Everything Right. It Wasn’t Enough.
The perfect biohacker résumé: 30 years of training, a supplement stack, wearables, clean labs. None of it measured the artery wall where an 80% blockage grew.
The Battle for the Coronary Artery Scan That Saved My Life
ECG, echo, Holter, stress test: all normal. A coronary CT angiogram (CCTA) found an 80% blockage anyway. What it shows, and the exact words to ask for it.
The Study the Keto Community Uses to Say LDL Doesn’t Matter. Then the Follow-Up Got Retracted.
The Keto-CTA follow-up was retracted in 2026 at the authors' and editors' request over methodology. What soft plaque did in one year, and why LDL still matters.