Dietary supplements / Medications that reduce arterial plaque and / or soften arterial walls?

PeetyPeet, you are so right, there is a ton of information available on the net about this. The problem is, not all of the information is correct, so knowing this I tend to not wear myself out reading it all. I do not use the net looking for symptoms either, lol, I would be a walking time bomb. If you are having some issues, you best source is speak to your dr & if you need medications he will rx something. If none are needed then he/she should be able to recommend certain supplements. Drs are more open to supplements, along with diet & exercise.

Take care.

Thanks for your replies everyone.

I won't bore you with my medical history....all I will say is...13 years visiting doctors and various other med pros. Let down repeatedly. In a worse state now than when I first approached them. Hence why I've turned to forums and the internet.

I'm intelligent enough to take everything I read with a pinch of salt and research thoroughly before I try anything new.

If anyone is able to answer my initial questions I'd be very grateful.

Thank you.

My internal medicine specialist went back to school & recently became a Board Certified Lipidologist. She still practices as an internal medicine doc but her practice is moving towards lipids, prevention, etc. she's only one of 6 in Oklahoma & practices in Edmond. If you live in or near a big city you can probably find one close by. With the aging baby boomers, it is a growing field.

My buddy and I decided to try a couple of things we had read about. And it worked. We reduced our plaque in six months. We are both retired military, Al is retired AF officer and I am retired Naval Aviator. We both, in the same year, had heart incidents. We are both age 78. They were not heart attacks and no damage was done to our hearts but we both wound up with 2 stents. Mine were in my LAD, the Widow Maker, and I was lucky to be alive.
We asked our cardiologist what we could do to reduce our plaque. We were both told, "nothing."
So going back and reading Linus Pauling's work on vitamin C (he won 2 Nobel Prizes) Pauling said that Vitamin C would work as a Roto Rooter in our veins.
Al's research led him to Vitamin K2 mk7.
Now if you search for these two items on Amazon you will be surprised that the sales is impressive and so are the remarks. They both work. The best way I know of to tell if they work is by having a "Calcium Score." The news and your doctor probably tell you the plaque is made of Cholesterol, LDL. Really it is made of a mixture, primarily Calcium mixed with some Cholesterol. Remove the Calcium and the plaque disappears. So if you try this experiment, first get your doctor to prescribe a Calcium Score. Most health Insurance will not pay for the test but all hospital radiology departments offer Calcium Scores and most cost from $100 to $150. It is worth it. Now my cardiologist argued with me and refused to prescribe the test. He said that when they had me in the Cath lab inserting the two stents in my artery they could see lots of plaque and most of my major arteries in my heart were at least 65% clogged with plaque. In other words, I was a walking time bomb for a heart attack.
Al had a Calcium Score a year ago and it was 3,500. Don't ask me what the units are but the small MRI machine (mine was a foot thick, not the typical MRI long cave) scans your chest and totals the amount of plaque in your veins and comes up with a score.
So Al took the Vitamin K2 mk7 for 6 months and I took both, the Vitamin C and the Vitamin K2 mk7 and then we both went in for a Calcium Score. Al's new score was 2,200. Down from 3,500 in 6 months.
I didn't have a previous Calcium Score but my cardiologist estimated it would be between 3,000 and 5,000.
My Calcium Score was 940. My cardiologist was stunned and said he doubted the validity of the report. I laughed all the way home.
The Vitamin C I took for six months was a powdered Acerola Cherry Extract. You can buy it as a food supplement or as Natural Vitamin C. I understand that Ascorbic Acid is artificial Vitamin C and will not work as well as natural vitamin c. But I am a pilot not a doctor, chemist or expert in nutrition. We plan to continue taking the two supplements, Al was impressed by my results so he now takes both. In 6 months, around May of 2018 I will get another Calcium Score and post the results here.
If you look at the NIH (National Institute of Health, a govt org) publications web site you can do a search for Vitamin K2 mk7 and there is a very impressive research paper of a study conducted in Poland that showed K2 reduced plaque. The U.S. drug companies ignore such studies because a non-prescription vitamin that removed plaque would destroy a 30 billion a year Statin industry.
If you want to do this, first get a Calcium Score. It is actually the best test indicator of your plaque and should be included in every health plan but the pharma corps would not like anyone to suggest that plaque is anything but cholesterol.
Dose: We took 2 vitamin K2 mk7 a day, one morning one evening. I took about 6 grams of the powdered Cherry by adding 1.5 teaspoons to my water bottle 4 times a day. I found to me there was no noticeable taste of the powder and it did not add color to the water or juice. I preferred the no-sugar fruit flavored waters.
Lots of luck an please post your results. One of my doctors is taking the two supplement now. He thought our experiment "remarkable." I would really like to hear from anyone their beginning and periodic calcium scores.
My personal information. I grew up in Houston, Texas. I entered Navy flight training after 3 years of college as a Naval Aviation Cadet in June, 1960 and graduated as a Navy Pilot in Dec 1961. Spent 3 years in a VP squadron, then flight instructor followed by Post Graduate School, tour as a Catapult Officer on CVA 63 USS Kitty Hawk (two Westpac tours) then joined the airlines and flew mostly international. Started domestic on the B727, then capt on the B757, DC10 and retired on the B747-400. I only had 2 years on the B747 before reaching mandatory retirement age of 60 and wish I could have continued flying that wonderful machine for 20 more years. Now mostly stay home, garden and play golf. I spent 40 years living somewhere else out of suitcase. I like home. And I want to live for a long time, healthy.

Everyone should read the Norwegian Hunt 2 Study. It shocked the cardio world when the Norwegians conducted a study using over 20,000 Norwegians including women. No U.S. Statin study conducted by the drug companies on statins included women. Women were excluded from U.S. Statin studies because there has never been a correlation with high or low cholesterol and CVD for women. And a slim correlation for men. The study concludes that for men over 60 with high cholesterol live longer than men over 60 with low cholesterol. For women the study says that not only is high cholesterol not harmful but is actually beneficial.
The Norwegians are not stupid and before they bought into the Statin scam, buying the drug for every adult in Norway the govt did not trust the drug companies and did their own study. Find it on the NIH.gov site
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21951982