If you have had heart problems, odds are your cardiologist is going to recommend you take this.
But because it’s not a drug pushed by a big drug company you may not have heard much about it.
It’s a vital supplement called CoQ10.
People who have had to see a heart doctor have been increasing the use of this supplement which has corresponded with the 44% decrease in heart failure death rate when CoQ10 supplements are used.
The New England Journal of Medicine reported this major decrease in death from heart failure.
Now 71% of cardiologists recommend CoQ10 to their patients. It is the number one supplement they wanted their patients to take.
One Japanese study showed just how important CoQ10 was to heart attack survival.
They found that patients with sub-optimal CoQ10 levels died within 24 hours of being admitted to the hospital.
Having 22% lower CoQ10 levels was enough to increase their chances of death.
The same study also found that low CoQ10 levels were related to:
- Higher incident of death
- Higher C-reactive proteins (the inflammatory marker for post-surgical complications)
- Taking statins resulted in 21% lower CoQ10
Another study showed that CoQ10 helped cardiac patients preserve their brain functions.
The observational study showed worse attention and overall function on people who had low CoQ10 levels.
In the biggest study on the effect of CoQ10 in a randomized study of 2149 heart failure patients, CoQ10 supplementation decreased mortality by 31%.
It also increased how much exercise these patients who received the supplement were able to do.
Support for CoQ10 wasn’t always the norm.
Doctors and the Food and Drug Administration are used to drugs that give big and immediate changes in heart health.
Because this supplement does not have this major immediate impact in cardiac health the government is used to seeing in most drugs, they ruled that CoQ10 had no clinical benefit back in the 1980s.
It wasn’t until years later that it was discovered that CoQ10 takes up to two years for this supplement to build up in the heart for significant effect.
But when taken over time doctors saw a 42% reduction in all forms of death in the study.
Patients received 100 mg three times a day, and the results were impressive after two years of use for people who had suffered heart failure.
CoQ10 was hardly known in the US prior to 1983, even though it had been used in Japan for years.
In 1989 the Food and Drug Administration sent armed officers to seize CoQ10 from supplement manufacturers and it finally took the federal courts to get the FDA to back down.
This wasn’t the first raid against supplement companies.
In 1987 the feds sent 25 armed thugs with automatic rifles to grab legal supplements with guns drawn.
The whole raid was ruled illegal when it was discovered that an FDA employee lied in an affidavit to a federal magistrate.
But that didn’t stop the feds from putting everyone against the wall and having all their personal property searched and, in some cases, illegally seized.
What is amazing is it took almost 20 years for the federal government and mainstream medicine to finally recognize the amazing power of this low-cost supplement.
