Cardiometabolic Risk Assessment
The reward of knowing your risks.
This test panel shows us your personalized prescription for living longer while living better.
Cardiometabolic Risk Assessment
In-depth information about what’s going on inside your body is one of the most valuable things you can possibly get your hands on, and that’s certainly the case with a cardiometabolic risk assessment.
It’s a test that measures eight different markers that tell us a lot about your personal risk for life-altering events like a heart attack or stroke.
This information goes far beyond what a typical insurance-covered cholesterol test will tell us. While those tests are a step in the right direction, they simplify and reduce important information to “good” and “bad” cholesterol numbers, and there’s much more to it than that. We get a more complete picture of the inflammation in your heart and blood vessels to understand which types, shapes, and sizes of cholesterol particles are having the biggest impact on your vascular health.
Once we have that understanding, we can assess if any numbers are dangerously elevated, indicating you have a higher risk of impending heart attack or stroke. If that’s the case, we’ll craft a plan together to reduce your risk and avert potential disasters through a tailored blend of diet, exercise, lifestyle modifications, medication, and supplementation.
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Whether you’re a 40 year-old marathon runner who eats a plant-based diet or you’re a 70 year-old working toward a healthy weight and fitness regimen, we can gain invaluable information by understanding what’s really going on in your blood vessels. Whether or not you “look” healthy or feel healthy, we can detect abnormal numbers that warn us early about potential dangers and how to avoid them.
We want to do everything possible to expand your healthspan, giving you as many vibrant, independent decades of life possible. Nobody wants to spend that chapter of life bedridden, debilitated, and unable to speak after suffering heart attacks and strokes.
So let’s get to work.
Our Approach
Often, we’ll recommend a cardiometabolic risk assessment as part of your greater treatment plan, whether you’re seeing us for help with weight management, hormone support, or something else.
We order the tests from a local partner lab, where they do a simple blood draw. Results take about a week to come back, and we sit down to walk through everything the tests uncovered. Your Pinnacle doctor will provide you with a thorough writeup explaining every result and what it means for you personally.
If your risk is elevated, don’t worry, you’re not alone in figuring out what to do. We may recommend further testing, like a coronary CT calcium score, to understand exactly what damage has already been done and inform how aggressive to be in treatment.
We can also perform genomic testing panels to check your response to cholesterol-controlling statin medications. We can even set you up with a ten-day continuous glucose monitor (CGM) to understand what affects your individual blood sugar. At Pinnacle, your treatment will be completely personalized so you walk away empowered with answers, not befuddled by hard-to-understand unknowns.
Pinnacle Cardiometabolic Risk Assessment services
Knowing is the first step toward doing.
We know that medicine is about more than numbers and stats. It’s about real human lives, and we’re here to provide the answers and insights you need about cardiometabolic risk so you can take the reins in creating a brighter long-term healthspan.
First, we’re here to help explain what cardiometabolic risk is. It’s your likelihood of experiencing a future health emergency like stroke and heart attack, which can be deadly at worst, and devastating at best. They can either end our lives or leave us permanently compromised or even bed-ridden. This is a scary reality, but the fact is, with the right testing, we can see these things well ahead of time. And, with the right action plan, you can drastically reduce the likelihood of such crises.
To assess your cardiometabolic risk, we look at factors that interplay with one another, like your blood sugar, cholesterol, and inflammation. Your activity level, diet, weight, stress levels, blood pressure, genetics, and smoking can all play a role in these numbers.
Standard doctor’s office tests not only oversimplify the numbers to “okay” or “not okay” cholesterol levels—they also only look at your risk for the next ten years. most of us would rather live much longer and plan accordingly. It may not sound like great news, but it’s extremely helpful to know now if you have a slowly impending heart attack on the horizon in a couple decades. Because now is the time to take action and prevent it.
There’s more to the cholesterol story than “bad” and “good.”
You’ve heard of HDL and LDL, but those are just the basics. There are more “bad” cholesterols than just LDL, and not all HDLs get reflected as part of your “good” cholesterol.
All cholesterol gets carried around by lipoproteins, and measuring those carrier proteins can give us a better look at what’s going on than a typical test would. It’s also important to measure the particle sizes of the cholesterol in your blood stream to understand your levels of inflammation and disruption to the cells in your blood vessels and heart. (It’s much more inflammatory for blood vessels to get peppered by 1,000 tiny LDL particles than it is for them to get hit with five big beach balls of LDL—and yet a typical cholesterol test would show all sizes of LDL lumped together in one number).
For example:
If a typical testing panel said your LDL is 75, you and your doctor would assume all is well. But it wouldn’t show if you’re carting around highly inflammatory LDL beebees that make your LDL’s impact much worse. If that’s the case, we’d want to treat aggressively to hit a lower target LDL number.
Welcome to feeling better.
How Pinnacle works — without getting insurance involved.
We use a direct-care model that avoids the hassle and restriction of insurance, which means we can see patients as often as they need, take more time with them, and offer more thorough care. While we leave insurance out of the patient-doctor relationship, insurance still may cover your medications, or we may be able to connect you with coupons that keep the cost of medication to a minimum.
Book your consultation
It all starts with a phone consultation so we can get to know one another and make a plan.
