 Homo-assisting heart. Hi, this is Dr. Ruscio, and Homo-assisting is essentially a protein that can damage your arteries and is an independent risk factor for heart disease. Now, the question then is, is what can you do about Homo-assisting that may help protect your heart? Well, recently in our podcast, we went through a very intensive review of all the medical literature showing that by lowering or which would be improving because high homo-assisting is bad and lower homo-assisting is good. So by lowering homo-assisting with B vitamins, consistently it's been shown to have no impact on heart disease. However, what this may tell us is that Homo-assisting may not be something that we can simply lower with a vitamin per se to have a beneficial effect. It may be that homo-assisting is telling us that there's something wrong in the body and that is what needs to be treated in order to lower the homo-assisting in order to improve someone's health. Because again, right now if we use a B vitamin, yes, we can lower homo-assisting, but no, that does not correlate with any decrease in cardiovascular disease or death. So then what else might we be able to do or how else can we address this high homo-assisting? That's an independent risk factor for heart disease. Again, independent meaning irrespective of your weight, your blood pressure, your cholesterol levels, homo-assisting, if increased, does correlate with increased risk for cardiovascular disease. A recent study published offers some very interesting information that I think makes a lot of sense. In this study, subjects that had high homo-assisting were given a probiotic, and this was a very traditional probiotic, a combination of lactobacillus and bifurobacterium, and what this did was it helped to increase the amount of these bacteria in the gut. That then increased B12 and folate production naturally, and then that correlated to a decrease in homo-assisting. So we're achieving the same endpoint here of lowering homo-assisting, but we're doing it through giving a probiotic. So potentially what this may mean is that homo-assisting may be ultimately a sign of dysbiosis or imbalance in the gut, and by giving or restoring the correct bacterial balance in the gut, we can then allow those bacteria to produce the natural B vitamins that they produce, amongst many other things, and this all creates an environment that lowers homo-assisting. Now what we don't know is how this specific trial correlates with heart disease because it wasn't long enough and it didn't really track that. But there have been some initial trials showing that probiotics do have favorable impacts on things like cholesterol levels and inflammation. So there's still much that we have to learn here about the long-term effects of probiotics on hopefully improving cardiovascular disease, but I think this is a very interesting study that shows a different approach for lowering homo-assisting through the gut that will hopefully be shown to have a long-term benefit on cardiovascular disease. One final point here I should mention that I think is very important. There's increasing discussion about a subset of cardiovascular disease that is autoimmune in nature, and if you think about the pathophysiology of much of heart disease, it has to do with immune activation against cholesterol. And we know that the largest density of immune cells in the body is in the small intestines. So again, another tie-back, again theoretical, so we have to be cautious, but another tie-in to how modulating the gut may help with the immune system, may help with heart disease, and also modulating the gut may help with B-vitamin production, homo-assisting metabolism, homo-assisting levels, and hopefully heart disease. So in short, a better approach may be, again we don't know this for sure, to use probiotics in attempts to lower homo-assisting and hopefully this will have a positive impact on cardiovascular disease. Certainly there have been many benefits to probiotics outside of cardiovascular disease that have been well-documented, so we don't need a really strong support rationale to suggest to try a probiotic, track your homo-assisting, and see if it has a positive impact. So this is Dr. Ruscio. I hope this information helps you get healthy and get back to your life. Thanks.