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Regressing atherosclerosis

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This thread is now closed. Please contact Anna DUK, Ieva DUK or everydayupsanddowns if you would like it re-opened.
Eddy Edson said:
Yup. But the money saved by vaping is a really big factor too, hugely more than it would have been 20 yrs ago (here, at any rate).
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I still can't believe people here pay £10 a pack - it was £2 when I stopped and that was part of the reason for stopping! 😱 🙄
 
Northerner said:
I still can't believe people here pay £10 a pack - it was £2 when I stopped and that was part of the reason for stopping! 😱 🙄
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It’s almost double that here, if I have the exchange rate right. Apparently the govt is beavering away on plans for big taxes on vaping, to replace the revenue it’s losing ...
 
Northerner said:
I still can't believe people here pay £10 a pack - it was £2 when I stopped and that was part of the reason for stopping! 😱 🙄
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Because it's *essential* that I have numbers .... 🙂

Price for a pack of 20 Marlboro, below. As I suspected, Oz is the most ciggie-expensive place in the world.

1. Australia 15.69 £
2. New Zealand 14.16 £
3. Norway 10.45 £
4. Ireland 10.40 £
5. United Kingdom 10.00 £
6. Iceland 8.45 £
7. Canada 7.98 £
8. Singapore 7.90 £
9. Israel 7.40 £
10. France 6.93 £
11. Switzerland 6.33 £
12. Finland 6.06 £
13. Netherlands 5.98 £
14. Belgium 5.63 £
15. Germany 5.54 £
16. Hong Kong 5.53 £
17. United States 5.33 £
18. Palestinian Territory 5.29 £
19. Sweden 5.15 £
20. Denmark 5.11 £
 
Wow! I'm surprised anyone in Oz can afford to smoke! 😱 There has certainly been an increase in 'roll your own' cigarettes here, but I think that, overall, the percentage of smokers has fallen considerably in recent years - I believe it's about 1 in 5 now, whereas when I started in the 1970s I'd say 4 out of 5 of my friends smoked. Things definitely improved here when they started banning smoking in so many public places - railway/tube, on buses, in pubs and restaurants and I imagine most workplaces. Not only does this restrict the places where you can smoke it also reduces the temptation when you are trying to cut down or stop. More recently, the ban on advertising, plain packaging, and display in shops is probably helping. I often feel when I am out and about and see someone smoking, especially a young person, like going up to them and saying 'Why?' 😱 🙂
 
Northerner said:
I often feel when I am out and about and see someone smoking, especially a young person, like going up to them and saying 'Why?'
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I'm getting to that point, but at the moment I mainly still feel jealous 🙂
 
Eddy Edson said:
I'm getting to that point, but at the moment I mainly still feel jealous 🙂
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Haha! It took about two years before I got past the 'jealousy' stage 😱 🙂 I can remember in the early days following smokers in the street and indulging a bit of passive smoking 😱 Now I positively avoid doing that or going anywhere near a person smoking if I can help it, especially since the asthma diagnosis. It took me a while, but I finally started to realise how non-smokers felt around smokers, and how pronounced the smell of stale smoke on clothing etc. was. Another benefit was that I no longer needed to decorate as frequently because my walls weren't turning a dirty yellow! 😱 🙂 I was fortunate that, when I was diagnosed with diabetes and had an angiogram my arteries were declared 'pristine', so no lasting damage, and also when diagnosed with diabetes I had a chest x-ray which showed no problems 🙂 Undoubtedly the best thing I ever did for my health 🙂
 
Anyway, the doc is on board with upping the Rosuvastatin to 20mg. Let's see if I can get my LDL down to rabbit levels, or at least something like a mildly sclerotic deer or kangaroo.
 
Aye, then you can live as long as a rabbit, deer or kangaroo.

Oh, hang on a minute...:D
 
mikeyB said:
Aye, then you can live as long as a rabbit, deer or kangaroo.

Oh, hang on a minute...:D
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At least for that brief period I might be bounding along like a supple-arteried kangaroo, rather than doing my Emperor Claudius impression.
 
So my hamster-level-LDL strategy, via doubling statin dosage and replacing full-fat dairy milk with soy milk, has some encouraging early results. I'm walking a lot further - daily avg now 10+km, up from 8km, with stretches of 3km at a time; getting to the point where time becomes more of a constraint than cramps.

Of course, quite likely to be some combination of change of weather, muscle building, increased run-off from collateral vessels, psych boosts etc etc etc.

But I live in hope of some day being able to establish myself as a Youtube guru: "How I resolved my diabetes and atherosclerosis by following widely-available mainstream expert recommendations".
 
Progress! Best walking distance since I started measuring it today - 14.8km, and average 11.1km per day for the week. I really start to feel I can get a stranglehold on this claudication nonsense & make it beg for mercy.

The focus now is on upping walking speed - try for more of a confident loping stride, less of the pained determined shuffle.
 
Wow 14.8km is a seriously respectable walk, that’s really impressive!
 
Madeline said:
Wow 14.8km is a seriously respectable walk, that’s really impressive!
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Not all in one go, but I am feeling smug about it!
 
So today 15.1km, and feeling like I could have walked forever except I have other stuff to do. I'm now at "Amish farmer"-level daily steps (tho without the barn raising, wagon fixing, hog slaughtering, ejecting Satan from kid thrashing etc etc).

Really seems to have been a step change in blood flow. I wonder what's happening with my "occluded left distal superficial artery over a segment of 5cm". We used to invest in a start-up which had a Star Trek-ish hand-held medical ultrasound device. Now I want one!
 
So it's a month along in my quest for atherosclerosis regression via achieving timid herbivore-level LDL, and I have to say it might actually be working. This is a chart of my daily walking distance since last month:

upload_2019-4-27_1-39-13.png

I lost all my earlier data when I killed my old phone, but it had been slowly edging up to that 9km and a bit level in March from ~8km over several months, and from maybe around 6km over the past year - then it stuck. But since starting the new regime there's been quite a rapid improvement & now averaging about 13km.

I'll get my lipids tested sometime over the next week or so as part of my delayed one-year review, to see how the LDL is going, and I'll cadge an appointment with the vascular guy to get my stenosis, occlusion, ABI etc etc checked out & see what's actually changed in the arteries.

In a sense, I suppose the claudication seems to be resolved for the moment. I'm still not walking as fast as I'd like, I still need to take little breaks & my calf still gets a bit achy. But I can't really say it's interfering with my lifestyle - walking 13km+ per day was never a big part of my life before this all happened.
 
This guy is now my hero:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29278187

A 46-year-old man presented with symptoms of peripheral vascular disease in 1966. In 1976 arteriography revealed 100% occlusion of both femoral arteries at midthigh and some reconstitution of flow via collaterals into the popliteal region. His cholesterol level was initially 407 mg/100 ml, and his walking tolerance was 100 yards. After a 26-day stay at the Pritikin Longevity Center, his cholesterol dropped from 230 mg/100 ml to 130 mg/100 ml, and his walking tolerance increased to 3 miles in one hour with little leg pain. He has run more than 20 road races and completed a marathon. A recent exercise Doppler exam and a second arteriogram indicated a significant increase in blood flow due to dilation of deep femoral arteries and existing collateral vessels.

What I'm doing is a little bit similar to Pritikin, as far as LDL lowering goes, and I was never as badly off as him (one femoral artery occluded, not both of them). So I live in hope that maybe someday I too can run a marathon! I walked 16.6 km = 10 miles + the other day ... a way to go.
 
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