Micronutrient Health Blog | SpectraCell Laboratories - November 2010

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News that matters for your health.

Clearing up the Cholesterol Confusion – So Your Patient Can Understand It

There has been a lot of talk about cholesterol recently in the news.  This is largely due to one startling statistic to which most people are unaware: 50% of people who have heart attacks have "normal" cholesterol.  What??? Stated differently, that means that half of all heart attack victims may have had a routine cholesterol test done on the very day they had the heart attack and felt fine because their cholesterol (by routine testing standards) was "normal."  So, why do so ma... Read More
Posted by Elissa Rodriguez at Monday, November 29, 2010

Discrepancy or Deficiency? Vitamin D

It seems that there is a consistent issue with variances of serum and functional measurements of vitamin D. In short, serum determinations give a static quantitative measurement while functional intracellular assays reflect the long term status of Vitamin D levels. The results of the serum and functional tests may or may not be in agreement, but this apparently conflicting information is still useful to physicians and patients. If a patient has a low serum level of vitamin D, yet the function... Read More
Posted by Elissa Rodriguez at Friday, November 19, 2010

Nutritional Considerations of Pain Management

Vitamin D & Musculoskeletal Pain Vitamin D deficiency often presents clinically as musculoskeletal pain. Correcting this deficiency can improve bone and muscle pain dramatically in patients with fibromyalgia and the painful bone disease osteomalacia. Coenzyme Q10 & Migraines, Myopathy Supplementation with CoQ10 helps prevent migraine headaches, according to recent clinical trials. In addition, CoQ10 has been shown to relieve statin-induced myopathy by improving energy metabolism in mu... Read More
Posted by Elissa Rodriguez at Friday, November 12, 2010

Why is MTHFR Genotyping Important?

MTHFR is an enzyme responsible for converting 5,10-methylenetetrahydrofolate to the product 5-methyltetrahydrofolate - it is involved in the metabolism of folate and homocysteine. The product of the reaction catalyzed by MTHFR converts homocysteine (a potentially toxic amino acid) to methionine (a useful and necessary amino acid). MTHFR Genotyping is Important because: Certain mutations in the gene coding for MTHFR produce an enzyme that has reduced activity. Reduced activity can lead t... Read More
Posted by Elissa Rodriguez at Friday, November 5, 2010