Ten Clicks to Reliable Cholesterol Information
In This Chapter
� Reading through the government’s cholesterol guidelines
� Checking out cholesterol-lowering products
� Navigating a cholesterol information quiz
� Finding facts about general drugs
Keep two things in mind when surfing the medical Web:
1. Be cautious. Absolutely anyone can dream up a Web page, so you’re not always guaranteed accurate information. When choosing among sources, exercise good judgment. Look for a reputable name and reasonable advice, not pie-in-the-sky (even if it’s a low-fat and cholesterol-free pie) recommendations. The sites listed in this chapter meet those guidelines. So click to your heart’s content. Or rather, to its health.
2. Things change on the Web, more quickly and more often than you may expect. If you can’t find a site listed here or if when you do find it, the contents don’t match the listing, just go with the flow. After all, the new stuff may be even better than the last round.
The American Heart Association
You can also reach the American Heart Association’s Cholesterol Low Down by calling up the basic AHA site (www.amheart.org), clicking on the site map, and scrolling to Cholesterol Low Down under Healthy Life Style. Or, as with other big sites that have smaller sections on cholesterol, you can get where you’re going by clicking on the address above.
The Cholesterol Low Down is the American Heart Association’s national cholesterol education program whose primary aims are to urge us all to see the doctor, determine our cholesterol numbers, and set out on a five-step plan for long-term heart health. Accordingly, this page has five buttons to click: Getting Started, Adjust Your Diet, Get Active, Check Your Progress, and Keep it Up (and Down).
Each button leads to a well-designed page with concise directions. For example, click Adjust Your Diet and you get a page pointing you toward sub- sections such as Eating to Lower Your Cholesterol, How to Shop, Fat Facts, and (goody!) Recipe of the Month. All in all, this information is pretty much the kind of solid info you’ve come to expect from people who spend their professional lives worrying about your heart.
Brand Name Cholesterol-Lowering Drugs
You’ve got questions. These sites have answers about the medical drugs most frequently prescribed for lowering cholesterol. The general format includes information similar to that found on other sites. The hot stuff on these is the occasional offer of a free course of the med via a coupon you take to your doctor who writes a prescription that you hand to the pharmacist. What? You thought they were going to send it through the mail?
Of course, you can also access online information about these drugs by typing their generic names into the search box of any search engine. Table 15-1 lists brand-name drugs and their generic equivalents.
Center for Drug Evaluation and Research
As its Web address indicates, the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) is a division of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The CDER Web site offers valuable information and evaluations of drug products, including those used to lower cholesterol levels.
For another path to cholesterol-specific medications, you can go to the main FDA homepage at www.fda.gov and type cholesterol-lowering drugs in the search box. You get millions of documents and pages of articles on every- thing even faintly linked to these medicines. The site is pure heaven for hypochondriacs. No, no, I didn’t mean you!
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
You can go to the homepage for the CDC (www.cdc.gov) and try to maneuver your way through to the page devoted to cholesterol, a workout in itself.
Or you can simply go right to the cholesterol page with the address above. Me? I chose the second path. But then, I get my workout on a balance board every day, so who needs all that extra clicking? Either way, the CDC cholesterol page gives you what this agency is famous for — facts, statistics, and prevention strategies. And, of course, the latest news and press releases. Neat.
The Mayo Clinic
When it comes to consumer-health communications, the Mayo Clinic is true blue, just as cozy and user-friendly as all get out. I typed cholesterol into the search box and up popped more than 200 essays on cholesterol. Most relevant? The first 50, from High Blood Cholesterol to Heart Attack.
For people fuzzy about cholesterol facts, the Mayo Clinic’s absolute claim to fame, on exhibit here, is its intelligent, balanced, and easily accessible pre- sentation of serious technical stuff. Not to mention its sly (maybe uninten- tional) sense of medical humor. For example, did I mention that in its list of cholesterol-related essays the Mayo Clinic lists “Heart attack” right after “Erectile Dysfunction: A sign of heart disease?” Hmmmmm.
MedicineNet.com
MedicineNet.com — don’t you just love the spiffy capital N right there in the middle? — is a doctor-owned, doctor-maintained Web site with a newsy point of view. Medical info junkies may browse through all the topics or choose the cholesterol-specific info, which dishes up a tasty smorgasbord of cholesterol bits and bytes.
When I typed cholesterol into the search bar, I got back a list of more than 1,000 cholesterol-related articles on
� Diseases and conditions
� Health and living
� Ask the experts
� Medications
� Procedures and tests
� Health news
I also received general tips for living well while controlling my cholesterol. Frankly, I figure if you read them all, you can wave good-bye to your doctor and hang up your own shingle to treat your own cholesterol conditions. Just kidding.
MedlinePlus.com
MedlinePlus is a service of the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health. Right there on the homepage is an alphabet that gives you access to absolutely tons of information about practically any medical subject that crosses your mind. You can access cholesterol information directly with the address above, or you can go to the homepage at — what else? — http://medlineplus.gov, click C, and then pick your way through to Cholesterol.
Either way, you get to look at Basics, Research, Overviews, Latest News, Diagnosis/Symptoms, Treatment, Prevention/Screening, Alternative Therapy, Nutrition, Disease Management, and Specific Management. But, as Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, one-time Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives used to say, “All politics is local.” The same goes for cholesterol: If yours is worrisome, you want help right in your hometown. So my favorite click on this site is the one labeled Go Local. Click here, choose one of the 19 states listed either from a drop-down list or an interactive map, and you can wander through resources as far as the eye can see — or the typing finger takes you. The only complaint: How come they don’t list all 50 states? For now, the simple answer is, what you see is what you get. But check back later: And, no, I have no answer right now.
National Cholesterol Education Program
The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) launched the National Cholesterol Education Program (NCEP) in November 1985 with a goal of reducing illness and death from coronary heart disease (CHD) in the United States by reducing the percent of Americans with high blood cholesterol.
Through educational efforts directed at health professionals and the public, the NCEP aims to raise awareness and understanding about high blood cho- lesterol as a risk factor for CHD and the benefits of lowering cholesterol levels as a means of preventing CHD.
The first Web site listed above takes you directly to NCEP. The second provides access directly to the latest cholesterol guidelines:
� The executive summary of the 2001 Third Report of the Expert Panel on Detection, Evaluation, and Treatment of High Blood Cholesterol in Adults, also known as Adult Treatment Panel III (or ATP III for short)
� The full ATP III
� The ATP III Update 2004: Implications of Recent Clinical Trials for the ATP III Guidelines
These reports are widely considered the official word on cholesterol evaluation and treatment for most high-powered health groups, such as the American Heart Association — and for your doctor, too. (For a dissenting view to the ATP III Update, check out Chapter 12.)
Other goodies on this second site include information about cholesterol- lowering drugs and conditions that may increase the risk of elevated cholesterol levels. The “fun part” is an interactive calculator that enables you to predict your ten-year risk of heart attack based on your cholesterol level and other personal risk factors.
National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute
You got a taste of NHLBI from the first list of Web sites in this chapter that sent you to ATP III. Now, open up the door to a ton of statistics and snippets of health information about (what else?) your heart, your lungs, and your blood.
Before you leave this site, take note of something special: a link to studies seeking patients. Before a new medicine or treatment method is approved by the Food and Drug Administration, there must be proof that it’s “safe and efficacious.” (Translation: It won’t kill you, and it does work.)
Much of the required proof comes from government-sponsored trials. To find out more about trials currently in progress, run your mouse over to the left side of the page to the headline Clinical Trials, then go down one line, and click NHLBI Studies Conducted at NIH in Bethesda, MD, to pull up various ongoing studies. Check this out to see if you want to join a trial to assess the potential of a new treatment program.
Stedman’s Online Medical Dictionary
Listen, making your way through medical terms, including the various forms of cholesterol, can be a daunting task. Stedman’s is the ne plus ultra (Latin for, “nothing better than this”) medical look-up book. On this version, you can type in a whole word, search by the first two letters of the word, or search backwards, meaning you can type in a keyword or definition and get the exact word you’re looking for. So do it!
WebMD
This site is just terrific. Go to the homepage, type cholesterol into the search box, click Enter, and there’s no end to the things you can discover.
The medical experts who run this site keep adding information on cholesterol guidelines, cholesterol-lowering drugs, and cholesterol-control diets. You name it, and it’s here. Best of all, the material is accessible, reliable, and . . . well, you fill in whatever good word comes to mind.
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