Ageless: The Naked Truth About Bioidentical Hormones (41 page)

C-REACTIVE PROTEIN AND INFLAMMATION

The top three killers today are heart attack, cancer, and stroke. Chronic inflammation plays a significant role in the development of each of these lethal diseases. If you have chronic inflammation in your body, it can be measured. One of the best and simplest ways to measure inflammation in your body is with a C-reactive protein (CRP) blood test. It detects a protein in the blood—C-reactive protein—that is a sign of inflammation within the artery walls. High levels of C-reactive protein indicate an increased risk for destabilized atherosclerotic plaque. When arterial plaque becomes destabilized, it can burst open and block the flow of blood through a coronary artery, resulting in an acute heart attack.

If you have this test—and you should—you want your levels to be below 0.5. Anything higher than that is an indicator that all is not well. Also, ask your doctor to order you a “high-sensitivity” CRP test. The standard test used by many labs does not measure the minute levels of CRP necessary to adequately determine cardiovascular risk.
Life Extension
magazine recommends ordering a low-cost high-sensitivity CRP blood test by mail by calling 1-800-208-3444. I have nothing to do with this service, but I feel it will benefit you to
know that it can be done at home and then have the results sent to your doctor to interpret. An antiaging doctor would be the best person to read the results for you.

Catch chronic inflammation now before it catches you later in life; don’t wait until it is too late. Inflammation experts have determined that a CRP reading of 3.0 mg/L or higher can triple your risk of heart disease. Men with high CRP levels are three times as likely to suffer a heart attack in the next six years as those with lower CRP levels. The danger is even higher in women. By contrast, people with extremely low levels of CRP (less than 0.5 mg/L) rarely have heart attacks.

Those with elevated C-reactive protein have not only increased risk of heart attack, but also a two to three times greater risk of stroke. In people who have already suffered a stroke, higher levels of C-reactive protein predict the likelihood of another stroke or heart attack or dying within the next year.

What many doctors do not know is that people with high levels of C-reactive protein in their blood also have an increased risk of certain cancers. Chronic inflammation facilitates the transformation of normal cells into cancer and also increases the proliferation of existing cancers. People with the highest blood levels of C-reactive protein are three times as likely to get colon cancer.

Sometimes the reason for the initial inflammatory cycle is obvious, as with chronic heartburn, which continuously bathes the lining of the esophagus with stomach acid, predisposing the person to esophageal cancer.

In addition to cancer and heart disease, chronic inflammation is involved in diseases as diverse as heart valve dysfunction, obesity, diabetes, congestive heart failure, digestive system diseases, and Alzheimer’s disease—all “diseases of aging.”

According to the book
Disease Prevention and Treatment
(fourth edition) published by the Life Extension Foundation, “Aging results in an increase of inflammatory cytokines (destructive cell-signaling chemicals) that contribute to the progression of many degenerative diseases.”

Inflammatory cytokines can cause allergies by inducing autoimmune
reactions; anemia, by attacking erythropoietins (hormones that stimulate the production of red blood cells by stem cells in bone); aortic valve stenosis (a narrowing of the aortic valve) by chronic inflammation that damages heart valves; and arthritis by destroying joint cartilage. Inflammatory cytokines do other dirty work. They are involved in congestive heart failure due to chronic inflammation that contributes to heart muscle wasting; fibromyalgia due to elevated inflammatory cytokines; and lupus due to an autoimmune attack by inflammatory cytokines. Kidney failure is caused by inflammatory cytokines that restrict circulation and damage nephrons, filtering units in the kidneys that remove waste products from the blood.

The beat goes on. Inflammation also destroys brain cells. People with CRP levels in the upper three quartiles are three times more likely to contract Alzheimer’s disease.

In the last decade of her life, my mother became 98 percent blind with macular degeneration, a chronic eye disease that causes damage to the macula (central retina) of the eye. Affecting more than 10 million Americans, macular degeneration is the leading cause of blindness in people over fifty-five. The American Medical Association has published a new study indicating that systemic inflammation increases the risk of macular degeneration. This study evaluated 930 participants and found that people with high CRP levels were significantly more likely to develop advanced macular degeneration. The study concluded that “elevated C-reactive protein level is an independent risk factor for age-related macular degeneration and may implicate the role of inflammation in the pathogenesis of age-related macular degeneration.”

I agonized as I watched my mother stumble around, trying to feel her way to different parts of her home. If we had known then about the C-reactive protein test, maybe we could have steered this disease off its course before it reached such a debilitating stage. Macular degeneration struck my mother with no warning. One morning in her seventh decade, she woke up and the lights were out. She could see nothing but about a 2 percent peripheral blur. It was pretty devastating, although she handled it well. I don’t know what I would have done had it been me. My heart ached for her. I wanted her to see
again all that she once saw, but there was nothing any of us could do for her.

Like a fire burning out of control, systemic inflammation is sometimes difficult to control. This is especially true in the elderly and the obese. Fortunately, there are ways to lower elevated C-reactive protein. The best way is to find a doctor who specializes in antiaging medicine, since elevated C-reactive protein is a result of aging. Other ways to guard against an outbreak of uncontrolled systemic inflammation and lower C-reactive protein is by managing stress, eating right, and taking the proper inflammation-suppressing supplements. The Life Extension Foundation recommends the following supplements and other agents to lower CRP:

• vitamin E
  
• borage oil
  
• fish oil (very important)
  
• DHEA replacement
  
• vitamin K
  
• nettle leaf extract
  
• ibuprofen, aspirin, or one of the statins (to be tried if diet and supplements fail)
  

As for lifestyle, here is where sleep is again a factor. If you skipped the section titled “The Importance of Sleep” (
this page
), please read it now. Lack of sleep markedly increases inflammatory cytokines, which helps explain why pain flare-ups occur in response to sleep deprivation in various disorders. Menopausal women are at risk for high levels of CRP because hormonal imbalances make sleep impossible. It’s like dominoes: hormones are off, can’t sleep, disease has a chance to take hold, elevated CRP results, and so on.

Even modest sleep restriction adversely affects inflammatory cytokine levels. In reporting the results, a carefully controlled study by the Life Extension Foundation noted that sleep deprivation caused a 40 to 60 percent average increase in the inflammatory marker IL-6 in men and women, while men showed a 20 to 30 percent increase in TNF-a. Both TNF-a and IL-6 are potent proinflammatory cytokines
that induce systemic inflammation. Here is another instance where the importance of restoring hormone levels to balance comes into play. Balanced hormones allow you to sleep!

INFLAMMATORY CYTOKINES: A PRIMER

As a health-conscious person, you should familiarize yourself with these terms, because excess levels of these cytokines cause or contribute to many disease states. Here are the acronyms that represent the most dangerous proinflammatory cytokines:

TNF-a = tumor necrosis factor–alpha

IL-6 = interleukin-6

IL-1b = interleukin–1 beta

IL-8 = interleukin-8

I urge you to take inflammation seriously. If you have a chronic cough, if you have chronic stomach discomfort, if you can’t sleep, if you have leg pain, if you have chronic fatigue, if you are constantly clearing your throat, if you have a choking problem, if you feel nauseated frequently—these are all symptoms of inflammation. Most important, have a C-reactive protein blood test.

Remember this: As we age and become hormonally imbalanced (women and men), we lose the ability to “turn off” inflammatory reactions. This problem also occurs in younger people as a result of genetics, bad diet, and poor lifestyle habits. If you continue to smoke and eat badly, you are challenging your body to become chronically inflamed. Your body’s immune system will end up attacking the arteries, brain cells, joint cartilage, and every organ system.

The symptoms we put off as “nothing,” such as a chronic cough or hoarseness, is your body talking to you and warning you of what may come. Listen and make changes. A simple blood test can set you on a path of good health and change the course of your life. We are not necessarily genetically disposed to the ailments of our predecessors unless we take on their unhealthy diet and lifestyle habits. You have the opportunity to change the course of your family history by making a few simple changes.

CHAPTER 21
D
R
. M
ICHAEL
G
ALITZER:
A
NTIAGING
M
EDICINE

Dr. Galitzer is my personal antiaging endocrinologist. His approach to medicine is to increase energy in the body. The question we all have to ask ourselves is not how old you are, but how young is your energy? It was Dr. Galitzer who introduced me to this concept. He practices energy medicine in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, California. He is on the cutting-edge curve of the latest and greatest medical breakthroughs. It is a privilege to be taken care of by this kind, interested, and motivational doctor. Be sure to read the interview with “Wendy” to see the kind of work Dr. Galitzer is doing
.

SS:
Thank you for your time. You always have so much to say because you are naturally curious. I think curiosity is a great plus for a doctor because you keep up with all the latest information. But I have noticed that in the media, antiaging medicine gets a bad rap. They dismiss antiaging medicine as though it’s not really medicine.

MG:
Antiaging medicine is very real. It attempts to increase the energy of the body. Because lack of energy is associated with the aging process, I look to regenerate the body by restoring the ideal physiology and the optimum functioning of the cells, organs, and metabolism. The difficult thing is as we get older, we have less and less energy. The challenge as an antiaging physician is, how do you increase the energy with older people? How do you get them to have
more energy? I use a lot of intravenous therapies, such as intravenous vitamin C or intravenous glutathione. These are great ways to increase energy.

SS:
I know after my regular glutathione and vitamin C drips, I do feel energized, as well as strong and vibrant.

MG:
It does have that effect. I also use herbs or other methods such as detoxification to remove toxins from the body. Bioidentical hormones are also effective for increasing energy.

To help people with energy, traditional medicine uses thyroid hormones, growth hormone, cortisol, and prednisone. In antiaging medicine, we use bioidentical estrogen and progesterone for restoring energy. Growth hormones also seem to help. Once we are able to increase energy in a person, we can then start the process of regenerating their body.

SS:
Why do we lose energy as we age? Where does it go?

MG:
It is spiritual and physical. Physically, we are exposed to far too many toxins from the environment, including heavy metals such as lead and mercury, and these exposures represent a major problem. As an example, I saw a guy two years after the fact who actually swallowed a mercury filling, and about a year later he started having rectal bleeding. His doctors didn’t know what was wrong with him. They finally had to take him to the operating room, and after they opened him up, there was this huge cancer in the small intestine and inside the cancer was the mercury filling.

Mercury is the worst toxin in the environment, more dangerous than arsenic and lead. As a society, we are inundated with heavy metals like these, and they are making us sick. In antiaging medicine, we work to detoxify the body of these heavy metals.

SS:
I have a friend, a famous clarinetist, who eats only sushi and raw fish. He lives a healthy lifestyle, but his doctors have found so much mercury in his system that he has been advised never to eat fish again. Why are fish so loaded with mercury?

MG:
It has to be from the environmental toxins. It’s a huge problem and is affecting the health of everyone on the planet.

SS:
You mean from dumping or from sewage?

MG:
Absolutely. Dumping and environmental toxins. The two big offenders are tuna and swordfish. Both are loaded with mercury. Your musician friend should take chlorella before he eats the fish; the chlorella will help find the mercury in the gut to help move it out of the system.

In doing this work, I have found that certain people are mercury excreters. For some reason that no one understands, these people can be exposed to mercury, but it’s not a problem. But there is a whole other group who are nonexcreters, and they are the ones who complain of chronic illnesses. With these people, taking out the mercury fillings from their teeth is important. After these fillings are removed, we must use a chelation sulfur compound called mercurialentis.