A new way of treating cholesterol, developed in Melbourne, could help reduce the risk of heart attack and strokes in almost one in five Australians.
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00:00 Cardiologists here at the Victorian Heart Hospital are calling this treatment a real
00:06 game changer.
00:07 And we don't normally like to bandy about carelessly the word breakthrough when it comes
00:12 to medical stories, but researchers do say that this is a world first treatment and it's
00:16 the first time that you can ever take a tablet to treat high levels of the bad cholesterol
00:22 known as LP(a).
00:25 The head of the hospital here, Professor Stephen Nichols, says that LP(a) is actually the evil
00:33 cousin of the much more well-known cholesterol LDL.
00:37 And he says it affects about 20% of the population.
00:41 It's also genetic, meaning that no matter what sort of exercise or good diet you might
00:46 have and what doctors do to treat your cholesterol or your high blood pressure or even your diabetes,
00:52 you're still at much higher risk of cardiovascular disease or stroke because it's very difficult
00:58 to reduce the levels of LP(a) in your body.
01:03 And at the moment there is no effective treatment.
01:05 It has been known about LP(a) for nearly 60 years now.
01:10 However, it's been difficult to work out the sorts of levels and now they have much more
01:16 widespread genetic testing.
01:18 They're also easily able to do blood tests as well and the sort of quality of those blood
01:24 tests has improved as well to be able to find this.
01:28 But the treatment previously has just been injections, which most people wouldn't really
01:32 want to tolerate.
01:34 So this is the first time they've got a tablet which is called Muvalaplan.
01:39 And they've had early trials of Muvalaplan showing that it actually can lower levels
01:45 of LP(a) in your body by up to 65%.
01:50 That's also really important because LP(a) is much more sticky than LDL cholesterol,
01:55 so it's got much more chances of clogging up your arteries as well.
02:00 And Professor Nichols is now over in Amsterdam presenting this early research to a cardiology
02:07 conference where he's talking about the fact that these early trials have shown that people
02:12 have really been able to tolerate Muvalaplan, this new treatment, really well.
02:17 So he is looking forward to doing much larger scale global clinical trials.
02:23 And if they are successful, we could be seeing Muvalaplan being widely available for patients
02:29 not just here in Australia but also abroad within about five years.
02:32 So it's certainly going to be quite a game changer when it comes to reducing the risk
02:37 of heart disease and stroke.
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