HDL INFUSIONS TO REVERSE ARTERIOSCLEROSIS - Gabe Mirkin, M.D.

A study from the Cleveland Clinic shows that plaques can be removed from arteries in just six weeks. Thirty years ago, researchers showed that a family living in a Northern-Italian town, Limone sul Garda, lived to be very old and were extraordinarily resistant to heart attacks. Lots of people live to be one hundred years old and do not suffer heart attacks, but these people were extremely unusual because they had extremely low blood levels of the good HDL cholesterol that prevents heart attacks. The researchers found that these people had HDL cholesterol that were much denser and had much larger particles than the normal HDL cholesterol.


Subsequent studies showed that large, dense HDL cholesterol is far more effective than other HDL cholesterol in clearing the bad LDL from the bloodstream. So researchers concluded that the large, dense HDL is so much more effective in preventing heart attacks that these people don't need very much to prevent arteriosclerosis.

Before the discovery of this special HDL cholesterol, researchers would not have wasted their time trying to give HDL to prevent heart attacks because they could not patent a biological product and therefore could not make any money from their experiments. However, this special large, dense HDL-Milano is a specific product that can be patented, and if they could prevent heart attacks by giving this special HDL cholesterol, they could make a lot of money. So they were able to copy the gene for large, dense HDL cholesterol from the people living in Milano and by genetically engineering other cells, could produce huge amounts of the large, dense Milano HDL .

The next step was to infuse the HDL-Milano, once-a-week for six weeks, into people with plaques in their arteries and show that the plaques became much smaller. That has been done. It will be more than six years before HDL Milano is available to the public. For now, avoid smoking and being overweight, restrict meat, chicken, whole milk dairy products and partially hydrogenated fats. Eat huge amounts of plants. Exercise regularly and you won't need the HDL -Milano by intravenous infusion.

JAMA, November 4, 2003

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