by Carolyn Thomas     ♥    @HeartSisters 

“After the shock of having a heart attack at age 39, I was a new mom at home with an infant, trying to make sense of being both a new parent and a heart disease patient”.    Katherine Wilemon had known since age 15 that she had high LDL (“bad”) cholesterol, but years later was diagnosed with a cholesterol disorder called familial hypercholesterolemia (FH), and then with elevated levels of another fatty particle in the blood called lipoprotein(a) – Said out loud, this is called “LP-little-(a).

One in five people worldwide have the same cardiac risk factor that Katherine had.  Dr. Henry Ginsberg at Columbia University, a leading expert on lipoprotein(a), explained in the New York Times: (“A Heart Risk Factor Even Doctors Don’t Know About”):

“People don’t know about it, physicians don’t know about it.”     . 
Continue reading “Family history of unusually early heart attack? You may carry this gene” →