Welcome to the MyBuddyGreen podcast. I'm Jason Wackeb, founder and co-CEO of MyBuddyGreen and your host.

No other such Philips Wombley360. Innovation and you, Philips.

Dr. Michael Twyman is a board-certified cardiologist who focuses on the prevention and early detection of art disease.

He completed his cardiovascular training at St. Louis University after he completed a four-year active duty tour as an internist at the Naval Hospital.

You've heard. Michael, welcome.

Thank you for having me.

So in terms of cardiovascular disease, to get started, what are some of the baseline tests or blood work that one can do should do just to gauge their general risk of developing cardiovascular disease?

Sure, and this is a topic that everybody needs to kind of become educated on and it kind of comes down to two items.

You know, one you have to look at the biochemistry, what is floating around in your blood at this time.

And that's what everybody's used to getting down their traditional cholesterol panel, maybe their hemoglobin A1C, their thyroid.

But you also need to be looking at actual health of the arteries and there's numerous tests I can look at the elasticity of the arteries.

How much nitrogen oxide the arteries can release, inflammation of the arteries, and then plaque.

Because that's what you're really trying to prevent is plaque formation of the arteries and ultimately the plaques that lead to events, heart attacks and strokes.

So you can start with the imaging first.

You know, often recommend people, you know, after they do 40, consider a CT cornea calcium score.

If they've not previously had known events, you know, they've not had a hard attack, a stroke, stance bypass.

You have your 40 year old with just, you know, maybe a borderline cholesterol or high blood pressure.

A CT cornea calcium score test, which is a low dose radiation CT scan, looks for calcifications and the arteries of your coronaries would sit on the outside of your heart.

You know, calcium is supposed to be in your bones and teeth. It's not supposed to be in your arteries.

So if it's in your arteries, in any case, there's been some break into your arteries and your body's laying down plaque.

I should say that the body's trying to repair that plaque by fibrosing it and ultimately calcifying it.

So the calcium isn't necessarily the problem. It just means that the arteries are getting damaged and your body's trying to deal with that damage.

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