You asked 349 questions about my LDL video. I'm answering the ones that matter most — including who paid for the study.

Last week I broke down the LDL cholesterol trial. The comments flooded in — and several of you asked exactly the right questions. In this follow-up, I'm going through the most important ones as a vascular surgeon who's spent years treating the consequences of bad cardiovascular advice.

In this video:
🫘 Kidney function & muscle toxicity — one commenter raised a sharp mechanistic point worth spelling out: statins can cause muscle damage → muscle damage could reduce muscle mass → less muscle mass means less creatinine production → which can look like improved kidney function on labs, even if your kidneys haven't actually improved. We walk through whether this confound holds up in the data.
📊 Number Needed to Treat (NNT) — the stat based on ABSOLUTE risk reduction that keeps drug effects in perspective
🔬 Plaque measurements vs. clinical outcomes — why these are NOT the same thing
💰 Funding sources — who sponsored the trial and how to weigh that when reading the results
✅ A genuine surprise at the end — something the authors did that I didn't expect, and that actually matters for how much we can trust this data

If you're on a statin, managing ldl cholesterol, or trying to understand heart disease risk beyond what your doctor has five minutes to explain — this video is for you.

Watch the original video first: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2lvd9ND7rA

Sign up for more information on my own practice here: https://corsighthealth.com/

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🧬 About Dr. Lily Johnston

Dr. Johnston is a double board-certified vascular and general surgeon in San Diego, specializing in metabolic and cardiovascular prevention. She’s the founder of CorSight Health and a passionate advocate for reimagining how medicine approaches chronic disease.

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