June 2008 Update - Something has happened!

The last post was at the end of February and the improvement noted there has continued, in fact to the stage where I am probably in a better state than I have been for several years. The graphic above shows the relationship between exercise amount - basically steps per day shown in light blue - and blood pressure (BP) tendency over the last 12 months. The red trace is the maximum daily systolic pressure and the dark blue trace is the average systolic pressure. All figures are averaged over a continuous 20 day moving period to iron out daily fluctuations and the BP difference is calculated by subtracting the average pressures for the whole of 2006.

Note the very large, and so far permanent, dip since the beginning of March, combined with the steady exercise regime since that time. Nothing like this has happened in a long while.


Having finished the EECP session in California at the beginning of February as noted before the BP did not really settle down although I felt considerably better. I decided about a week later to give up even decaffeinated drinks and bang! - within 2 weeks the BP had dropped by about 10mm. Since then there has been a steady although slow improvement in stamina and strength, effectively a slow healing process. This cannot be due just to EECP but possibly a virtuous circle effect of diet, exercise, medication and EECP all working together. It is still quite difficult to believe but it has been confirmed by a recent Bruce protocol stress test by my cardiologist who has booked me for another one in 6 months' time to see whether it keeps up.

The question is then - what is the secret? I suspect that there was a really persistent area of inflammation somewhere that has declined. In other words the chronic endothelial dysfunction that plagues me - and millions of others - has reduced a few percent and allowed the other improvements. Too early to say definitively but I live in hopes.

Endothelial dysfunction seems to be getting a lot more attention from the medics recently. It appears to be a pincer movement from several angles, not just conventional drug and intervention regimes:-

• EECP trials and results being more widely known
• Fundamental work to understand the physical and biochemical processes at play in the endothelium
• Effects of hormones and cholesterol transport mechanisms, in particular reverse cholesterol transport
  
• Flow mechanics studies
• Conventional intervention costs and their escalation
  
• Development of new and cheaper devices to measure endothelial funcion, e.g. Cardiatect
  

I believe a new paradigm approach is beginning to evolve in early detection and treatment of cardiovascular disease, of which EECP will be one of the constituents.

Finally, I commend the Yahoo EECP Group as a good source of new information on some of these trends.

Mike Slavin
Rye Harbour - UK  ¶ 10:35 am