Framingham Heart Study

So what happens is that the risk is actually significantly higher if your cholesterol is low, which is the exact opposite of what we think, right? And the exact opposite of why we do our cholesterols every year.

And this is the Framingham Heart Study.

This is the study that we base all of our medical decisions on.

And this is follow up over 31 years.

We talked about common symptoms of memory issues and ones that are reversible.

We spoke about the Framingham offspring study and how it impacts brain health over time, especially metabolic brain health connections, the impact of sleep, depression, vitamin deficiencies, and alcohol, as well as the impact of loneliness.

The three Ds: dementia, delirium, and depression, and red flags he sees in clinical practice.

How he helps prepare caregivers for caring for loved ones with neurocognitive memory loss.

I think it's really significant that you're assessing for that.

Let's talk about some of the work that you're doing on brain aging.

You have a Framingham offspring study and looking at links between metabolic dysregulation directly to brain MRI markers in terms of brain aging, and this was specific to middle-aged adults.

And so as I stated multiple times, my community, and myself included, we're all very conscientious about what are the things that we need to be thinking about that can be contributing to brain aging in and of itself.

At the time, this is twenty years ago, HDL raising was the Holy Grail.

We had data from the Framingham Heart Study that if your HDL is high, you're protected from heart disease.

They use the ratio total cholesterol divided by HDL.

That was a real famous ratio that we looked at.

The effect sizes were small in keeping with everything else we've discussed, but the direction was consistent.

When you zoom out to heart outcomes, a 2018 analysis from the Framingham Heart Study published in the Journal of Clinical Lipidology found that people with the highest levels of omega-3s in their blood had roughly a third lower risk of dying from any cause compared to those with the lowest levels.

That's the kind of endpoint that really matters.

There are trendier longevity molecules that biohackers get excited about, and a few of them do have legitimate research behind them.

So if you think you're going to get sick, you will get sick.

The Framingham Heart Study showed that.

Women who thought they were more likely to get heart disease and die of it, they did.

It was significantly higher, a significant finding.

I mean, uh, there are studies showing that with higher LDL, people live longer.

And the original Framingham Study-

Oh

... where that started this entire link between cholesterol and heart disease, the initial data showed that people with higher chlo- LDL cholesterol, uh, had higher risk of heart disease.

And if they do know and it's high and they've been ignoring it, should probably stop ignoring it.

You know, we've known about a lot of these consequences since the nineteen sixties from the literally the first iteration of the Framingham Heart Study.

So back then, we were kind of using a higher definition.

So we were defining hypertension as greater than one forty over ninety.