Avoiding Heart Disease

First of all, if your wife graduated from med school, she should have taken the Hippocratic oath. An oath written by the guy considered the father of western medicine.

You know what he had to say about diet?

“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food”

He also said something along the lines of "if you don't know diet you can't call yourself a doctor" but I can't find the exact quote.

>If you think diet and exercise are the only--or even the most effective--means of lowering morbidity for chd (which is what OP is worried about) you'd also be wrong.

Actually, you'd be wrong. Consider a clinical study carried out by the inventor of bypass surgery and another doctor, in the best heart hospital in the world considered by US News & World Report.

The study had very sick heart disease patients, who were told they had a year to live by their cardiologists, change their diet. 23 opted in for the study but only 18 chose to continue with the diet after a couple months. Those 18 patients are still alive today 20 years later, and several had an angioplasty done giving photographic proof their plaque buildup had cleared out. The ones who dropped out died shorty after.

The 18 never had a heart attack after they changed their diets, while before they did they had a combined 49 coronary events (that's ~3 heart related emergencies per person average).

So this year, I turned 38, off the BP meds more than 3 years now. Then, last month while in China with my family, I had a full blown stroke. Result was lost 2cm of my left brain directly in the region that controls speech and right arm & hand motor skills. Spent 8 days in a Chinese hospital.

For about one week, I talked like a stone cold drunk and my right arm was useless. I thought I might be that way forever. Luckily, after two months, I'm basically fully functionally recovered. Bottom line is the path from a risk indicator like high blood pressure to a stroke or heart attack can be fairly short. Now, at 38 I know I must make some radical change if I'm going to live to 70, no less not be a paralyzed half brain dead invalid.

I'm certainly interested in quantified self tech now. The problem is everyone that needs a doctor to take an intense personal interest in their long term health cannot possibly find a doctor to do so, for any number of reasons. Opportunity is to empower the individual non-medial experts to easily monitor their own health and risk factors over time. Will likely be moving into product development in this space myself.

I am not fat, I've always been thin and my cholesterol is bang on perfect, my blood pressure 120/80 or better. Although I've slacked off the gym for about four years I'm pretty active at work.

Anyway out of the blue I am diagnosed with fatty liver: it hurts, I can feel it. Know how people with fatty liver die? Heart attack or stroke, fatty liver significantly increases the chances of either or both.

My grandfather died at age 52 of a heart attack, his daughter my aunt died of a stroke after multiple heart attacks age 70-ish and her brother my uncle also died of a heart attack at age 52 same as his father. Their brother my uncle had a quadruple bypass in his late 50s.

I'm beginning to wonder if people with a family history of heart disease really have NAFLD.

I would love to be a customer of a competent company that managed body scans and the process of looking for deltas using humans assisted by software every N years.

Why?

Common medical wisdom now is that doing proactive body scans (usually just the trunk), even just MRI (so no radiation) is bad because it drives the expense and uncertainty of investigating every bump and shadow. And many of the tests will come back inconclusive. I understand that argument but it seems the way to deal with that is to focus not as much on scan #1 but scan deltas.

My anecodtal (IANAD) evidence is that in more than 5 cases of cancer in friends and families, a cancer diagnosis was delayed for many months from onset of symptoms and a few Oncologists have told me that they agree that for most of those cancers, that latency could have been improved if a baseline scan had been available of the organs/bones/nodes in question.

Not every patient would be a good candidate for such a service but the same is true for 23andme.