Hello there. I'm Dr. Kate Kreski back today with Dr. Sanjay-Bodraj for part two of our

cardiovascular and metabolic diseases podcast. How do you improve your cardiovascular risk and

how do you reverse metabolic illness if you've got it? If you're interested in learning the

truth about things like calcium scores and abolypoins and what you could actually do to reduce your

cardiovascular risk. Part two of this episode is for you. Remember, if you want to learn more from Dr. B,

you can head on over and sign up for the clinical decision-making guidelines and functional

medicine series at ruperturacy.com. Click on boot camps and then you're ready to get started.

So it's an important test. It's readily available easy test to get probably coming to your drugstore near you or whatever it might be

but as with anything you need to know how to interpret it correctly i think that's where

sometimes people get that false sense of security if they have a zero score because you can still have non-calcified plaque and that's the stuff that you really need to watch out for.

But on the flip side, that's also the plaque that is really responsive to dietary lifestyle changes, right?

So eat better, exercise more, and reduce your inflammatory burden.

And you see those vascular inflammation markers go down and people do great.

So even if you have an elevated calcium score, it will respond to diet and lifestyle.

Then you could do it again in a few years and you might see a change.

Yeah.

So calcium score, once it's there, it's there.

So what you're aiming for with that, you rarely, I don't think I can tell you in my clinical

practice, unless there is some sort of an error of

calculation. I've never seen it go backwards. But what you do is you modify the slope, right? If it's getting

worse like this or worse like this, those are two very different clinical situation. So what you want to do is

level off that progression. And that's really where the win is with calcium scores. Just by and the by, because there is radiation exposure and x-ray, and we don't want to irradiate people's chests too much and stuff. Generally, when I had patients, I would recommend it no sooner than every five years. You're going to see the progression, but you're not going to get all that x-ray. There's a lot of important structures in the chest you want to deliver x-ray to if you don't need to. And then you mentioned, so you want to do it in concert with the vascular inflammation markers,

...