Comment by captainkrtek
9 months ago
A relevant anecdote. I’m very athletic and skinny, eat well, have a resting heart rate in the 40s, but was recently prescribed a statin at 30, due to my very high LDL cholesterol and lipoprotein A.
My family has a history of cardiovascular disease despite us doing what we can w.r.t eating and exercise. I’d encourage you to get some tests at least.
My mother similarly was put on statins and is getting a cardiovascular work up (calcium scan) because she now has early atherosclerosis. She eats super healthy and is a former olympic sprinter..
Bonus anecdote: In my free time I do shifts as an EMT with my fire dept (911), that is a big wake up call to wanting to be as healthy as can be. The number of patients I see who are 50+, nearly all are on 5-10+ meds, few are just one 0, 1, or 2. At that age I see type 2 diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol, and more.
You're probably a "lean mass hyper-responders", a phenotype which is actively investigated, initial paper:
Elevated LDL-cholesterol levels among lean mass hyper-responders on low-carbohydrate ketogenic diets deserve urgent clinical attention and further research
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36351849/
A few other more recent papers:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35498420/
https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jacadv.2024.101109
Note: I'm not a doctor.
Interesting, thanks for sharing!
Seems a bit unfair sometimes how arbitrary genetics can be. I've fought my weight all my life, only recently achieving consistent success with the assistance of GLP1s. I can't claim to be consistent with exercise either. Yet my numbers are great, I've done some of these deeper tests and everything comes back beautiful. My parents were overweight their whole life and both lived deep into their 80s (and my dad only died because he got an unlucky gall bladder infection and then ignored all the rapidly accumulating evidence that he was getting quite sick; he'd have gone another few years most likely). I don't recall anyone in my immediate ancestors having a heart attack. Seems it's just not in our genetics.
My father-in-law is more like you. Athletic, skinny, been that way all his life. Heart attack and quad bypass in his 40s.
They have me on blood pressure meds and do the usual blood tests, the tests I considered have been elective and I requested them explicitly. Just haven’t followed through due to aforementioned hesitations. I’m very much aware heart issues run in the family and that I have symptoms.
But I would be very happy to do any elective non invasive tests. On the fence about going beyond that until/unless the Dr. flags it as needed.
That makes sense! Its easy I think to also go overboard and analyze too much, causing stress as you suggest.