I had an appointment with my cardiologist this week and asked whether it’s true that lowering the LDL below 70 would start to reverse arterial blockage and if so, how. Here’s what he said:

Yes, absolutely. When you have a cut, your body immediately goes into healing mode and in just a few days, the cut is usually well healed. If every day you beat on that cut, your body would be spending its effort to fix what you damaged by beating the wound and not the wound itself.

In a similar way, when you lower LDL, your body will stop fighting it and will start to smooth and harden the plaque in your arteries. This lowers the risk of a piece of soft plaque breaking off, causing a heart attack, stroke, or other event and overall, lowers the risk of a cardiac event. Over a very long time, at glacial speeds, the hardened plaque will actually get smaller, but he noted one might have to live to 150 to see the difference.

Lipitor has lowered my LDL from 252 to 109 and Repatha lowered that again to 27. Fingers crossed here