Norman Swan

So all bets are off from what we call normal cholesterol levels or normal blood pressure levels.

You want to get them down really low.

And the question is, how low should you go?

And the standard in Australia would be, for intensive therapy, probably lower than 1.7, thereabouts, right?

And what did the update say?

Right.

So acute coronary syndrome is you're heading for a heart attack.

So it's a bit more severe than just having baseline heart disease.

And how they did that was high-dose statins and also another drug that they use, ezetimide, which can be added to statins to give you extra cholesterol reduction.

We're all at risk of coronary heart disease.

So getting your LDL down through lifestyle and if your cholesterol is too high and you're at high risk, so your GP should be doing what's called an absolute risk score on you.

What's your chances of having a heart attack or stroke in the next five or 10 years?

And if that's high, you should be really managing things down.

Because they have a higher than average risk.

Yeah, so a bit of context here.

People who are anti-fluoride, and there's a lot of them around in Australia as well as overseas, one of the things they've clung to when they've gone to local councils to say, take the fluoride out of water, and it's certainly happened in the United States, is

It damages children's brains and damages their IQ.

And they've quoted certain studies to show that.

And this study has looked at those studies, tried to correct for what were major errors in those studies and give an accurate assessment of IQ.

And what they've done in this study is, rather than look at school performance, which is what some of the other studies have done as a proxy for IQ, they've actually looked at IQ.