Avoiding Heart Disease
In this video, Matthew Budoff spends about 27 minutes speaking on "Avoiding Heart Disease" at the 33rd Annual Cancer Convention held on Labor Day weekend by the Cancer Control Society.
About Matthew Budoff
MATTHEW BUDOFF, M.D. earned his Medical Degree at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
He currently is the Program Director for the Division of Cardiology and the Director of the Electron Beam CT Laboratory at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, California. Dr. Budoff’s research interests revolve around Preventive Medicine, with primary research interests involving risk factor identification and modification. He has done extensive research using the Electron Beam CT to identify those patients at high-risk for cardiac events and has published the only multicenter paper on this technology. Inhibiting Progression of Coronary Calcification Using Aged Garlic Extract in Patients was published in Preventive Medicine 39 (2004).
The investigators worked with cardiac patients, some of whom were given regular dosages of Kyolic Aged Garlic Extract (a product of Wakunaga of America Co., located in Mission Viejo, California) and others were given a placebo. At the end of the year-long, double-blind clinical study, the subjects taking the Kyolic Aged Garlic had less coronary plaque formation than did those in the placebo group. Further, the Kyolic group tended to have lower blood homocysteine and cholesterol levels, considered risk factors for heart attacks.
Transcription
Thank you very much. I'm a cardiologist, I work down at one of the county hospitals in Los Angeles, in Torrance, and up until about three or four years ago, I had a very conventional practice using the traditional medicines that we learned about in our training.
One of our oncologists, Dr. Nee Hara, who works very closely with me down at the hospital, told me about some of the research that's been done with aged garlic extract in preventing cancer and how it's also lowered cholesterol, lowered blood pressure and helped in general with heart disease. So we set out to do our research study to see how how much how much can we prevent as far as heart disease buildup in the heart. So a little about three years ago, we started a research project and it was we was very well done. As far as the science goes, it was what we called double blinded. So we put patients on on either aged garlic extract. It's a CIO like we used a liquid they used of a teaspoon a day or they were on placebo, no therapy. But I didn't know what they were taking and neither did the patient. So we were both blinded as far as what what they were actually taking. And we measured how much plaque was in their heart at the very beginning of the study. So we started with with just giving them this age garlic extract.
And we did this test called an electron beam C.T. It's a heart scan. There's also been body scans done to look for cancer. This one was mostly done to look for how much plaque is building up in the heart. And it tells us a number. It says you have a score of one hundred. And that would mean that you have that much plaque, 100 milliliters of plaque buildup in your arteries. And because the test is noninvasive, you basically go in there lying down as you are. You you can you don't have to disrobe. There's no needles. It's literally about a 30 second test. We can tell if somebody has no heart disease. Zero plaque. A moderate amount of plaque like a score of 100 or a severe amount of plaque, like a score of a thousand or more. So we can measure how much plaque is in the arteries. So we did this at the beginning of the test. We measured the plaque and all of the patient's arteries. We counseled them on on watching what they say, giving them good nutritional advice. We let them take whatever medicines they were already taking, many of them were taking at