Hi Margaret,
This URL will bring you to our Monograph and may help you understand your numbers a little more, a good marker is the TG/HDL ratio...
http://www.drsears.com/portals/6/Do...ochure.pdf2.4 Defining Wellness
It’s not enough to assume that if patients are not sick, then they must be well. There are really three distinct stages of chronic disease as shown below:
Wellness
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Sub-chronic disease
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Chronic Disease
The opposite of chronic disease is wellness. However as wellness erodes, the end result will eventually be chronic disease. The second stage of the disease process is the development of sub-chronic disease. With sub-chronic disease, both the physician and patients know they are not well, but they aren’t sick enough to be considered truly ill. This stage of sub-chronic disease is mediated by increased silent inflammation. The final stage is the actual manifestation of some type of chronic disease. Only then does the medical establishment throw its full armament at patients to hopefully drive them back into sub-chronic illness where the overt symptoms of chronic disease are temporarily submerged. However, it takes many years living in a state of sub-chronic illness before chronic disease ultimately develops. Thus the real goal of 21st century medicine should be to maintain patients in a state of wellness, and this can only be accomplished with the reduction of silent inflammation.
The first signs that wellness is eroding are changes in the markers of wellness as shown in Table 1.
The best marker of wellness is the AA to EPA ratio in the blood. This is the gold standard for determining the extent of silent inflammation in a patient. The ideal AA/EPA ratio is approximately 1.5. This is the AA/EPA ratio found in the Japanese (10-13), who are considered the longest-lived and healthiest population in the world (14). For reference, the average AA/EPA ratio of Americans is approximately 12, and for patients with obesity, type 2diabetes, as well as other chronic conditions associated with silent inflammation, the AA/EPA ratio is above 20.
Another marker of wellness is fasting insulin, which is a marker of insulin resistance. It is known that fasting insulin levels greater than 10 uU/ml have far greater predictive value for the development of heart disease than elevated levels of LDL cholesterol (15,16).
The final marker of wellness is the TG/HDL ratio. This is a marker of metabolic syndrome that precedes type 2diabetes by some 8-10 years. The TG/HDL ratio also indicates the relative size of the LDL particles (17-20). A low ratio is indicative of primarily large, non-atherogenic LDL particles, whereas a high TG/HDL ratio indicates a larger population of small, dense pro-atherogenic LDL particles. Prospective studies indicate that a low TG/HDL ratio is highly correlated with a reduction in the development of cardiovascular disease (20)
Elevated levels in these clinical markers are not an indication that a chronic disease exists yet, however, it does indicate that the inflammatory potential of the patient has significantly increased. This means the potential of increased inflammation at the cellular level has also been significantly increased. Although the patient not yet ill enough to be considered to have a chronic disease, the patient can no longer be considered to be well.
The therapeutic goal of anti-inflammatory medicine is to move the patient back toward a state of wellness. That can only be achieved by decreasing the levels of silent inflammation that can be determined by the clinical markers of wellness.
Table 1. Clinical Markers of Wellness
Test.............................../Chronic............../Poor/Good /Ideal
AA/EPA ratio.................../15 or greater /10...../3...../1.5
Fasting Insulin (uU/ml) /15 or greater /13...../10..../Less than 5
Triglyceride/HDL............./4 or greater /3......./2......./Less than 1