High Coronary Calcium Score: How do others feel emotionally?

Hello @mark430,

Living in an age of information-overload, it is so difficult to determine what is safe or real and what is not! I’m not a medical professional and cannot offer medical advice, but as a moderator on Connect I would be remiss if I did not share my concerns about chelation therapy. While there is a legitimate medical use for chelation therapy – as treatment for toxic metal poisoning – it has gained notoriety as a treatment for many other conditions like heart disease, atherosclerosis.

According to Mayo Clinic, "The safety and effectiveness of chelation therapy for heart disease can't be determined, even after a large-scale study was conducted to determine just that. Results of TACT didn't provide enough evidence to support routine use of chelation therapy for heart disease.” https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/heart-disease/expert-answers/chelation-therapy/faq-20157449

Some important, but overlooked facts from The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health div. of NIH (one of the sponsors of TACT) https://nccih.nih.gov/health/chelation

– Overall, TACT showed that chelation therapy produced only modest reduction in cardiovascular events. However, further examination of the data showed that therapy benefitted only those patients with diabetes. There was no significant benefit of EDTA treatment in participants who didn’t have diabetes.
– Among the patients receiving chelation, 26% went on to have a cardiovascular event, such as death, heart attack or stroke.
– 16% of those receiving chelation and 15% who were receiving the placebo stopped their infusions because of an adverse event. Four of those events were serious; 2 were in the chelation group (1 death) and 2 were in the placebo group (1 death).
– Dept. of Health and Human Services cited several concerns about the study, including that the researchers hadn't followed the rules.
– In 2006, the CDC reported that two children and one adult had died after receiving chelation. They all developed dangerously low calcium levels, which can cause the heart to stop beating.

At the risk of inundating you with more reading, I think this journal article might also interest you:
– Why the NIH Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy (TACT) Should Be Abandoned https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2438277/

In the constant search for "living our best life” or following popular (often misleading) trends like "natural equals safe,” I myself have given in to the temptations of anecdotal evidence (oh the joys of non-diet related weight loss supplements:) – rather than waiting for tedious, sometimes inconclusive, but often factually correct clinical evidence. So when considering complementary or alternative treatments, it is best to be be open-minded yet skeptical–making treatment decisions based on poor-quality scientific data can be dangerous, especially when it concerns heart disease.

@mark430, I will continue to research this topic to provide resources, and I’m so glad to read that you will consult your cardiologist about chelation. I’m tagging Mentors @hopeful33250 and @predictable and fellow members @thankful @mdemoI @surf362 , and look forward to hearing more from you.

I am wondering if anyone on this board has been able to decrease calcification using any method whatsoever. Looking forward to any indication of hope. Reading the TACT study, I was struck with the high dropout rate, a red flag. I am looking forward to Bluesdoc's opinion after he has interim testing done halfway through his course of chelation. I am even beginning to think that maybe bypass surgery could be done as a preventive measure (just as women with high risk of breast cancer opt for a mastectomy), although my guess is that surgeons would be unlikely to go along with such a request. I welcome any and all opinions on this matter.

Rooting for you as well. I’d say if it stays the same, it’s still a win. My understanding is that numbers can increase as much as 40% per year. In my case at 58 with a score of 400, after 10 years could be over 10,000.

Bluesdoc, I am rooting for you to improve and hoping that I will be able to do the same. Will anxiously await your results before making the final decision on initiating chelation. One thought: Given that calcification is expected to increase significantly year over year, could no or little increase be seen as a positive result of chelation?

Jennifer, thank you for your thoughtful, sensitive, insightful posting.

@mark430 You are welcome. Knowledge is power and can help you overcome anxiety, but it can also make you worry thinking that you must have what you are reading about online. There are times you just have to do your best and trust your gut. I learned about overcoming anxiety because I was very fearful and needed spine surgery. On my surgery day, I was completely calm and interested in what was happening around me when I was wheeled into the operating room. I have a background in biology that helps me understand medical literature that I read and I have a great physical therapist who helps release all those physically tense areas in my body. When you are anxious, you start bracing and tense muscles. that can trigger muscle spasms. I've had them in my chest and it can feel like a heart attack, but it wasn't one. I've had ribs that twist because of a muscle spasm. I have learned from my physical therapist how to release the muscles and fascia. I did go to the cardiologist for testing, and went to the emergency room too over this. You don't really want a cardiologist to find a problem, and it's great news when you get an all clear from them about your heart. As for plaque deposits in blood vessels, that starts because of inflammation that is inside the wall of the vessel first, and later plaque is deposited there. Eating a diet to reduce body wide inflammation is good prevention for a lot of diseases. You can also have elevated blood calcium levels if there is a problem with the parathyroid glands. My mom had that, and had surgery to remove one of the parathyroids that caused the trouble, and her calcium levels returned to normal.

I would encourage you to ask yourself questions about the source of your anxiety. I've done that and learned a lot about myself. Finding the source of the anxiety is finding the event or events from your past or your childhood where you formed ideas about how to cope with fear. I was still thinking like a 6 year old and it just didn't serve me well as an adult. I came to understand the fear and accept it, and comfort that vulnerable part of me. To do this and overcome fear is totally life changing. You might ask yourself why you think chelation is necessary to prevent heart disease or if you believe that there is calcification in your arteries and why. There are lots of other lifestyle choices and diet that go a long way in preventing heart disease. I started by writing down a list a fearful events from my life and why I felt the way I did. that showed me a pattern that was common to all of them. I had a lot of anxiety that came from an accident I had where I broke my front teeth as a kid. That in turned caused many dental interventions that were difficult for me, and restorations that failed and had to be redone. So now, I've had some anxiety because in spite of being a good dental patient to try to fix my mistakes I made as a kid, I might loose one of the teeth anyway. Sometimes you try your best, and it doesn't work. I realized I had to forgive myself for my mistake all those years ago and I found some unconscious beliefs connected to that old trauma that was causing anxiety and it made sense, so I could let it go. I think I'll be fine now, and I'll find out in a few days what my future holds. Here is my Mayo story:
https://sharing.mayoclinic.org/2019/01/09/using-the-art-of-medicine-to-overcome-fear-of-surgery/

I'm grateful for the last couple of days an old friend spent time here Shirley is a great baker ❤️ I have zucchini bread and peach jam she made Um that pumpkin roll was good 👌

Yes Mark, I plan on a repeat CAC score somewhere close to half way through and I will share here. If there's no change or worse, I'll probably stop, at $155 a pop.

Thank you, Tim and Bluesdoc. Very difficult choice. I do feel the way Bluesdoc does. Bluesdoc, you are part way through your course of chelation. When you complete it, do you plan to go for another CAC score? If so, would you be willing to share the results with me? I would await your findings. I realize it would be an n of 1, but it would be helpful to me to know how you fared with chelation.

The ND from whom I'm getting chelation was one of the investigators in the TACT study. It was better than equivocal, but their target was a bit different that this. NO ONE KNOWS ABOUT THIS. If we're trying to decalcify our coronaries in the absence of significant atheroma load, then we're a different cohort than those in the TACT study. And even if we could achieve some degree of decalcification of our coronaries, how does that translate into survival? NO ONE KNOWS. In my case, I just feel driven to do something instead of nothing (to decalcify). When I drop dead, if I have a moment to reflect, I want to know that I gave it my best shot (given no real data - only reasoning from basic principles). Life - whaddya gonna do??