Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 11 - PREMIUM - Earlobes and Cardiac Risk

Episode Date: August 8, 2018

A brief discussion regarding a weird genetic anomaly that predicts cardiac risk just by looking at someone's dumb earlobes.   VISIT: STUFF.DOCTORSTEVE.COM Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I've got Deuterio crushing my soft. Hey, it's your old pal, Dr. Stephen. We had a call after the show and decided we'll just put it up as a premium episode just for the hell of it, because it's a great question. So we've got Alex on the line, and let me bring him in. Alex, are you there? Is it Alex? Did I get that right?

Yes, sir. All right. Calling from Area Code 202. I don't know that. Oh, not you, Alexa. Not you. Let's see if she responds to that. Okay, yeah.

So what do you got, man? That's a great question. Yeah, so my wife actually brought this one up. So the connection between a crease and the earlobe, I think they call it Franks fine, and heart disease. And I wanted to ask you about the validity of that. I do have a calcium score of zero, but I do have heart. high blood pressure, smoker, alcoholism, all that. So what are your thoughts?

Okay. Well, it's an excellent question. You know, cardiovascular disease is one of the world's largest killers. 800,000 people die from cardiovascular disease every year in the United States. And it costs $200 billion a year. And, you know, if we had an inexpensive marker that allowed for early intervention, that would be awesome. And one of these markers is the presence of a diagonal earlobe crease or a D-E-L-C in coronary artery disease. And there's some correlation between that and the extent and severity of coronary artery disease,

independent of cardiovascular risk factors. You know, let me see if I can get, I'm going to do some PubMed stuff and see if there is any, numbers that I can throw at this as far as risk factors. So, yeah, here's a study on diagonal earlobe creases, a significant marker for coronary artery disease is a case control study. So you can't really do a double-blind placebo-controlled study on looking whether somebody has an earlobe crease. So what they, they looked at 200 participants and looked for earlobe creases and then followed

them over time for coronary artery disease. They said out of the 200 patients, 126 were males, 74 were females of the 100 cases. 76 had the diagonal earlobe crease and 24 had no crease, where amongst the 100 controls, 36 had the DELC and 64 had none. So they had 100 people that had early heart disease. and then they had 100 controls that didn't have early heart disease and what they found was

the ones that did 76% of those had it and of the ones that didn't 36 didn't or 36 had it so you got to subtract 76 to buy by 30 so that'd be 40 so it's a 40% increase and they said the prevalence of diseases such as hypertension diabetes smoking among the cases and controls were 66% 53 and 27

so it was marker for other things as well. And so their conclusion was there's a significant association between the DELC and coronary artery disease. And this was the first case control study disclosing this important correlation. This was in South Asia. So, yeah, it's interesting. So here's the thing. If we're going to throw this in as another risk factor, this is a risk factor. There's nothing you can do about it, right?

Like if you smoke, you can quit smoking. If your cholesterol is high, you can get it down either with medication or diet. If you're diabetic, you can get it down with medication or diet. But this earlobe crease, nothing you can do about it. So if you are at some increased risk of heart attack and stroke just based on this. And notice there were, you know, 36 people had it and didn't have any heart disease at all. So it's not a – having this doesn't doom you to a heart attack or a stroke. It merely is a marker for increased risk.

But if you know that you're at increased risk, then you have to get all these other risk factors under control. Or, you know, I have every right to just call you a dumbass, right? Because if you know, if you know like there's somebody gunning for you and it's going to run into your car, you'd be stupid not to wear your seatbelt that one day, at least even if you don't ever wear your seatbelt any other day. So if you have an increased risk of heart attack, then you've got to modify all your other risk to bottom that out as far as you can so that you could be in that group of people, the 36 people out of 100 that have the crease but don't have heart attack or stroke. So, yeah, moderating. It's interesting because, sorry, it's interesting because it's such a visible indicator. Yes.

And now I got something else to stress about when I look in the damn mirror. You know what I mean? Well, it should just look, knowing that you have a risk factor for something in a normal situation will mean that you're less likely to die from it because you know about it. So people who have familial polyposis or someone that's had a colon polypup that knows they're at increased risk of colon cancer are less likely to die from it because they're going to go. go do the colonoscopies every year that are required to make sure they catch it early enough so they can cure it, right? So this is the same kind of thing. When you look at that, that is just a thing that's going to encourage you to get your cholesterol

down, get your weight to its normal weight, increase your exercise, you know, stop drinking and quit smoking or whatever and get your cholesterol under control and your blood pressure and all that stuff. You know, it's something that you can use. use as a tool to encourage you rather than to use it as a device that just increases your anxiety, you know? Exactly. One last question about that.

So physiologically, what causes the ear decrease? Is that a circulation thing? I doubt it. I think this is probably one of these things where you have a genetic propensity for filling up your coronary arteries with atherosclerotic plaques, and one of the consequences of that gene is that during development, your earlobe develops this external sign that you can see, because we know these genes are multifaceted. They do lots of different things. It's just like certain medications like aspirin will prevent heart attack and stroke, but it also is good for an ankle sprain, you know?

and if given to young kids, they'll get RISE syndrome. So, you know, aspirin does all kinds of crazy things that are completely separated. And genes have multiple purposes as well. And it is weird that a gene that would code for a shape and for your earlobe would also have something to do with stroke and heart attack risk. But, you know, there you go. Yeah, very interesting. So change your outro to check your stupid nuts for lumps and check your earloves for creases. Okay, I'm going to throw that in there.

You're absolutely right. I'm doing it. I'm doing it right now. All right, thanks. Okay, buddy. All right, take care. All right, buddy. All right, and we will see you next time.

Thanks for hanging in there.