Questioning Statins (September 2, 2014)
Pharmaceutical manufacturers have been trying for at least 20 years to find evidence that people with no history of heart disease will benefit from taking statins. (Think about the increase in prescriptions of statins if that could be proved, and you see their motivation.) Well, it hasn’t been proved yet, but statins are still prescribed with this in mind all the time, and if you don’t have heart disease it doesn’t matter how low the statin gets your cholesterol, your risk of dying is the same. In fact, low cholesterol levels in the elderly are associated with higher mortality. Yet elderly people are almost always given statins – even when there’s no sign of heart disease and their cholesterol levels are fine to begin with.
We know people with lower cholesterol levels generally tend to have less heart disease. Statin drugs lower cholesterol. So that means that the more statins in use in a society prone to high cholesterol and high cardiovascular disease, the better, right? Well, that might be true IF THERE WERE NO DRAWBACKS TO STATIN USE.
When you use statins to lower cholesterol in people without heart disease in the hope of staving it off, you see slightly fewer strokes and heart attacks over a five- or ten-year period, but you see more diabetes -- the end result is that your risk of death is not lowered by taking the medication. Plus there are a number of other known side effects to statins. They include muscle pain, decreased energy, cognitive and sexual problems, and kidney and liver injury. In studies published by pharmaceutical companies, these don’t occur any often than with placebos. But anyone who works with people who take these things will tell you that the reality is entirely different. I’m a big fan of evidence-based versus anecdotal medicine, but don’t forget that a study has to actually be published in order for it to be considered as evidence. It’s been a matter of concern for years that 50% or more of the studies done by pharmaceutical companies on their own medications are never published.
Most importantly to my mind, no one has EVER compared statin dugs with lifestyle changes in the prevention of heart disease. A pharmaceutical rep will blithely tell you that taking a statin that lowers your cholesterol level by 20 points is just as good as lowering your cholesterol by 20 points by cutting back on eating hot dogs and peanut butter and walking around the block a few times daily. Many people are more than happy to believe them. Do you? I don’t. More on this next week.
--dr. diane holmes
Copyright © 2014
Pharmaceutical manufacturers have been trying for at least 20 years to find evidence that people with no history of heart disease will benefit from taking statins. (Think about the increase in prescriptions of statins if that could be proved, and you see their motivation.) Well, it hasn’t been proved yet, but statins are still prescribed with this in mind all the time, and if you don’t have heart disease it doesn’t matter how low the statin gets your cholesterol, your risk of dying is the same. In fact, low cholesterol levels in the elderly are associated with higher mortality. Yet elderly people are almost always given statins – even when there’s no sign of heart disease and their cholesterol levels are fine to begin with.
We know people with lower cholesterol levels generally tend to have less heart disease. Statin drugs lower cholesterol. So that means that the more statins in use in a society prone to high cholesterol and high cardiovascular disease, the better, right? Well, that might be true IF THERE WERE NO DRAWBACKS TO STATIN USE.
When you use statins to lower cholesterol in people without heart disease in the hope of staving it off, you see slightly fewer strokes and heart attacks over a five- or ten-year period, but you see more diabetes -- the end result is that your risk of death is not lowered by taking the medication. Plus there are a number of other known side effects to statins. They include muscle pain, decreased energy, cognitive and sexual problems, and kidney and liver injury. In studies published by pharmaceutical companies, these don’t occur any often than with placebos. But anyone who works with people who take these things will tell you that the reality is entirely different. I’m a big fan of evidence-based versus anecdotal medicine, but don’t forget that a study has to actually be published in order for it to be considered as evidence. It’s been a matter of concern for years that 50% or more of the studies done by pharmaceutical companies on their own medications are never published.
Most importantly to my mind, no one has EVER compared statin dugs with lifestyle changes in the prevention of heart disease. A pharmaceutical rep will blithely tell you that taking a statin that lowers your cholesterol level by 20 points is just as good as lowering your cholesterol by 20 points by cutting back on eating hot dogs and peanut butter and walking around the block a few times daily. Many people are more than happy to believe them. Do you? I don’t. More on this next week.
--dr. diane holmes
Copyright © 2014