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The Bottom Line: When you go for your annual physical, insist that your physician include homocysteine and CRP screening tests along as part of your blood work, along with your cholesterol check. Early detection and treatment of these reversible risk factors can quite literally save your life.

Cholesterol screening has become so routine that you don’t even have to visit the doctor to have it done any more. Drugstores, pharmacies, and health fairs offer on-site cholesterol screening...you can even buy cholesterol-testing kits to use at home. But cholesterol screening is not the most effective or accurate indicator of your risk of heart disease. According to the Framingham Heart Study, the largest and longest-running research study on heart disease risk factors, 75% of those who have heart attacks have normal cholesterol levels. And about half of those with high cholesterol never develop heart disease. Obviously cholesterol levels don’t tell the whole story.

In addition to cholesterol, there are other compounds in your blood that hold crucial information about your future risk of a heart attack, stroke, and other serious diseases. Two in particular have emerged as particularly reliable and accurate: homocysteine and C-reactive protein. Testing for and correcting these risk factors may be your best insurance against heart disease and Alzheimer’s disease. Best of all, both risk factors can usually be corrected without drugs, using safe, inexpensive nutritional therapies.

Homocysteine is a natural by-product of protein metabolism. When everything is working correctly, homocysteine is converted into other compounds for use in the cells. But if there is a shortage of the helper-nutrients that facilitate this conversion (in particular vitamin B-6, vitamin B-12, and folic acid), homocysteine can build up in the blood

Although high homocysteine itself doesn’t cause any symptoms, it can damage the lining of important blood vessels, dramatically raises your risk of suffering a potentially fatal heart attack or stroke. High homocysteine also increases your risk of Alzheimer’s disease, osteoporosis, and depression. The good news is that high homocysteine is easy to detect and usually quite easy to fix. A simple, inexpensive blood test will tell you your homocysteine level. A blood homocysteine level of 6.5 micromoles per liter or lower is ideal.

If your homocysteine is above 6.5, increasing your intake of B-6, B-12, and folic acid is usually all it takes to bring harmful homocysteine levels back into safe ranges. A typical homocysteine-lowering nutrient regimen would include 50-100 mg of B-6, 50-100 mcg of B-12, and 400-800 mcg of folic acid.

C-reactive protein (or CRP) is a substance that indicates the presence of low-grade inflammation in your body. As with homocysteine, elevated CRP may not create any symptoms that you can feel. But elevated CRP levels sharply increase your risk of heart disease, as well as Alzheimer’s disease, osteoarthritis, cancer, and adult-onset diabetes. CRP is also easily detected by a blood test and can be corrected with nutritional therapies.

If your CRP is above 2 milligrams per liter, you can help to reduce your risk of disease by adding anti-inflammatory nutrients to your diet. Fish oil capsules (1,000 to 2,000 mg per day) will usually do the trick. Ginger, garlic, and hot chiles are also anti-inflammatory and can be added to the diet.

The Bottom Line: When you go for your annual physical, insist that your physician include homocysteine and CRP screening tests along as part of your blood work, along with your cholesterol check. Early detection and treatment of these reversible risk factors can quite literally save your life.

For more information: The Life Extension Revolution by Philip Miller, M.D. and Monica Reinagel