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Thursday 27 October 2011

makanan ber kolestrol tinggi bukan saja merosakkan jantung, tapi ......

bila makan bercheese  dan berkrim berpada pada laaa..jgn ikut tekak sangat... jaga lah kesihatan.. kalau medical free tak pela.. kalau tak keja gomen, sapa nak bayar..bil ubatan dan spital..
baca lah kisah di bawah, bukan setakat cheese aja, makanan berlemak saturated/tepu dan berkolestrol tinggi perlu dielakkan...

My love of cheese nearly cost me my leg: Why high cholesterol doesn't just damage your heart


ditulis oleh : Lucy Elkins:




Digging in his garden last summer, Paul Phillips felt an ache in his right calf.




Dismissing this as nothing more than over-exertion he carried on, but just 12 hours later the delivery driver was in Frimley Park Hospital, Surrey, as doctors battled to save his leg.

‘It was a huge shock because my leg had felt fine up until then — it was throbbing, but I wouldn’t describe it as particularly painful,’ says Paul, 58, from Weybridge, Surrey.

‘I went to bed as normal, but in the early hours of the morning I woke up because the pain had become more intense and my foot and leg had started turning a dark colour.



'By the time my wife got me to hospital, my leg was going black and the doctors were warning me they might need to amputate it.’

Paul was suffering from a common condition called peripheral arterial disease (PAD), where cholesterol furs up the arteries in the legs, blocking off the blood supply.



Most people know high cholesterol can clog up the arteries to the heart, but less well known is the fact that it can clog up the blood vessels anywhere in the body — with the legs particularly vulnerable.

If left untreated, the arteries become increasingly blocked. The tissue is starved of blood and starts to die, leading to leg ulcers — or, as in Paul’s case, the build-up of fat triggers a blood clot that blocks the artery.

The disease becomes more common with age — it’s thought one person in five over the age of 65 in Britain has it to some degree.



Risk factors include high blood pressure, smoking and high cholesterol levels — men over 60 are most commonly affected.

‘Everyone who has prolonged periods of high blood cholesterol levels will have some degree of PAD,’ says Ian Loftus, consultant vascular surgeon at St George’s Hospital, Tooting, South London.

While not life-threatening in itself, those with the condition normally also have blockages in the arteries elsewhere in the body, such as the head and brain, so are at increased risk of heart attack and stroke.






The problem is that peripheral arterial disease often causes no symptoms — up to two-thirds of those affected have no warning signs.

When it does cause symptoms, such as leg pain, it tends to be dismissed as just a pulled muscle — as was the case for Paul, who is married to Sandy, 55, and has three grown-up children.

He says: ‘For 24 hours it was touch and go as to whether I would lose my right leg because there was virtually no blood going in or out of it.

‘Finally, after almost two days of flushing clot-busting drugs through my leg, there was a bit of blood moving through.’

Cholesterol causes problems in other parts of the body apart from the heart, brain and legs

Once some of the blood supply had been restored, surgeons removed the furred-up artery running from Paul’s groin to his knee and replaced it with a vein from another part of his leg.

Doctors told Paul, who is also a former smoker, that his high-fat diet had been largely to blame — particularly his love of cheese.

‘It was a real wake-up call for me — I had no idea cholesterol could do something like this.



'Before all this, my favourite food was cheese — I’d eat a large chunk every day. And I lived on takeaways. I was overweight — at 5 ft 10in, I weighed 15st — though I’d never had my cholesterol checked.

‘I have since been put on statins to bring down my cholesterol levels and follow a low-fat diet, with cereal for breakfast, and chicken or mackerel and salad for lunch.’

Patrick Chong, a consultant vascular surgeon at The Surrey Vascular Group Network and Frimley Park Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, says he is surprised how few people have heard of peripheral arterial disease, considering how common it is and how severe complications can be.

‘It’s a bit of a Cinderella condition. Information about it is often eclipsed by heart attack or stroke awareness campaigns.

'An early diagnosis allows doctors to implement lifestyle changes, such as exercise and diet, and use medical treatments, such as statins, to reduce long-term risks of heart attack and stroke.’

Peripheral arterial disease can be diagnosed by taking blood pressure in the arm and the ankle — if the pressure is much lower in the leg, it is a sign not as much blood is getting through.

‘There is some discussion that GPs should do this routinely as a form of screening because it is easy to do,’ says Mr Loftus.

The first treatment option is statins.



‘This has been found to help prevent the condition getting worse even when people do not have high cholesterol,’ he adds.

When little blood is getting through, surgeons insert a balloon into the vein and inflate it, which helps clear the blockage.

Another option — the one Paul underwent — involves using a vein to bypass the clogged artery.



Yet, still, in around 5 per cent of cases, the leg has to be amputated because blood supply is so reduced that the tissue dies.

‘Some people can have minor hardening but intense symptoms and vice-versa, but it’s unclear why,’ says Mr Loftus.

Cholesterol causes problems in other parts of the body apart from the heart, brain and legs. Fatty deposits can fur up the blood vessels to the penis, making it difficult to achieve an erection.

‘This problem is under-reported and under-diagnosed because men are often too embarrassed to seek help,’ says Mr Loftus.

Cholesterol may also increase the risk of dementia. A study has found that even moderately increased levels of cholesterol in middle life increased the risk of dementia. But Dr Simon Ridley, of Alzheimer’s Research UK, is cautious about this claim.

‘A study published since found people with Alzheimer’s who were given a form of statin showed no improvement,’ he says.

However, other studies have found that the Mediterranean diet — low in cholesterol and saturated fat — might have some protective effects against dementia.

Meanwhile, Paul, who learned his lesson the hard way, now steers clear of high-fat food.



‘Of course I miss cheese, but I’d miss my leg more,’ he says.

circulationfoundation.org.uk.


article dari dmail with thanks.