For the next several days I will be posting a special series
of articles about fighting high cholesterol. It will contain a light technical
discussion on how cholesterol works and why diet and drugs don’t always work.
This is also a personal story about someone very close to me struggling with extremely
high cholesterol and the effects it has on the human body.
My husband, Kevin, has been fighting his hereditary high
cholesterol (familial hyperlipidemia) since his mid 40s. All at once, a switch
flipped in his system and his production of triglycerides and LDL went into
over drive. His doctors at the time were baffled. A few years later he suffered
his first heart attack. He survived thanks to a very strong heart, a skilled
surgeon, and the installation of two cardiac stents. Over the next five years,
the cycle of heart attack and stenting would be repeated three more times.
Each time the cardiac events occurred, his doctors put Kevin
on a cholesterol-lowering drug, usually a statin. Most of the drugs had a positive
effect in lowering his LDL and triglycerides, but the side effects were
unbearable. In addition to intestinal upset and agonizing leg cramps, Kevin
suffered from dementia-like symptoms after about six weeks. One of his
cardiologists was so intrigued by the dementia symptoms Kevin experienced that
he went back to some of his elderly patients and took them off their statins. Their
dementia symptoms cleared up within a few weeks. While it was an amazing
discovery that helped many others, Kevin and his doctor still had to find a
solution for him.
A few states and several doctors later, Kevin ended up in
the care of a cardiologist that refused to try any medications when he realized
how poorly Kevin’s system had reacted in the past. As luck would have it, this
doctor worked in the same practice as a doctor who ran a program called
lipo-apheresis. As Kevin’s cardiologist explained, the process would run his
blood through a machine that filtered out all the LDL and triglyceride
components, leaving the helpful blood components and the HDL in tact. It
sounded almost too good to be true!
Kevin met with this other cardiologist, and she pointed him
in the right direction. After a few months of paper shuffling and some
unexpected delays, Kevin was finally enrolled in the process. He met with the nephrologist
directly in charge of the lipo-apheresis treatments. The lipo-apheresis
treatment works in a similar fashion to dialysis and is done at a dialysis
center, using a purpose-built machine in a private room.
The nephrologist explained that in order to start the apheresis
treatments, Kevin needed to get a hemodialysis catheter installed in his
chest. This gives the machine access to a large enough blood flow until a
fistula can be created in Kevin’s arm. This all sounded pretty scary, and we
weren’t sure what to expect.
Over the next several blogs I will detail the process Kevin
went through for the chest catheter, the fistula, the truth about cholesterol
(why healthy eating doesn’t work in cases of familial hyperlipidemia), and why
cholesterol meds don’t work for some people. I will also include pictures to
give readers a better understanding of the technology involved in the process
of lipo-apheresis.
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