|
Homocysteine is a newly identified risk factor for coronary heart disease. High levels can increase your risk, so can bringing them down - with folate and B vitamins - lower your risk? I've mentioned a substance called homocysteine before. It's a new-ish risk factor for coronary heart disease. And partly because of this, there have been relatively few trials of lowering homocysteine to see whether it makes a difference. A Swiss group has done this in a very high-risk group of people who already had such bad heart disease that they'd needed an angioplasty. (That's where a balloon catheter is used to widen a narrowed coronary artery.) They were given either placebo or a combination of folate and vitamins B6 and B12, which are thought to lower homocysteine. This was for six months, to see if it would prevent re-blockage and subsequent heart attacks. At six months there was a benefit, and now the findings at one year have been analysed. They show that people given the six months of vitamins had lower rates of re-stenosis, as it's called, of the original problem artery – and probably fewer heart attacks as well. The debate now is whether you need the whole cocktail of B vitamins, because the role of B12 is dubious and in fact folate by itself might be just as beneficial.
|
