From our friend Dr. Robert Wascher comes a nice item about walnuts and lipid control.  Enjoy, and be sure to check out his book, coming out soon!

I'm sorry to ask a profound question but what exactly is fish oil? Is it an antiarrhythmic or is it a cholesterol drug?

The word on the street is that patients who take fish oil have better cardiac outcomes not because of the effects on cholesterol or triglycerides but because of prevention of cardiac arrhythmias.  But in 2008 a meta-analysis came out in BMJ that throws cold water on that concept at least in retrospective studies.

A prospective study OMEGA is evidently finished recruiting and hopefully will publish soon.

Researchers from University of Miami gave us some clarity this week on a lingering question: at what age does being overweight start to affect health? Looks like the answer is as young as age three (!). That's the age at which researchers started identifying obesity-related changes in cholesterol levels and blood vessel inflammation. Now this story is not as strong as saying that kids had shortened longevity so all you can say is that it INDIRECTLY suggests that obese kids are a setup for problems down the road.

Don't throw away the Tylenol just yet but here's a report on the cholesterol-lowering medications called statins being used for disk disease of the back. The medicine evidently induces cells extracted from the liquid gel part of the disk to grow and multiply creating an additional supply of "nucleus pulposus" tissue. This can then be inserted back into the spine to regenerate lost tissue. This type of "designer tissue" creation will hopefully usher in a new way to heal injured body parts without surgery.

This may not come as news to cardiologists but the rest of us (ok me) were impressed that statins appear to reduce the severity of strokes. Patients taking statins before a stroke seemed to have less severe strokes and took less time to recover. This is perhaps evidence that statins are doing more than just reducing cholesterol; much has been made of their anti-inflammatory properties as well and maybe preventing inflammation after a stroke is critical to a faster recovery.

Lipid lowering agent rosuvastatin Found to reduce Cardiovascular events in patients with Normal Lipid Levels Published in the NEJM a recent study found that in patients with normal lipid levels the use cholesterol lowering medications reduced the rate of cardiovascular events. The study was a prospective controlled trial in which over 17 000 healthy subjects with normal lipid levels i.e. LDL cholesterol of less than 130 however elevated C-reactive proteins were randomized to receive rosuvastatin or placebo.

A new study has found that cholesterol medicines known as "statins" may reduce the risk of strokes heart attacks and death by almost half when studied in patients with normal levels of cholesterol. With this finding at least 32 million people would be eligible for treatment.  The drug studied is AstraZeneca Plc’s Crestor. The patients eligible for the study are those who have high amounts of a protein linked to inflammation.

JUPITER study: Cholesterol drug prevents coronary death even with normal cholesterol!

Lipitor 2.0: siRNA? PNAS: New technology lowers cholesterol 59% in rodents