Why avoid statins if you can.......
Today's post: Thursday, 2-28-2008
There are four reasons to avoid statin drugs if you can do so at all.
(Note that the most frightening ones are # 3 & # 4 in today’s post.) <<<<<
1. For their main purpose they are surprisingly weak compared to the impression most doctors now have of them. I read that of 100 people who take statins only about 1 of them will prevent a heart attack they otherwise would have had.
2. Even for their two main benefits, there are much safer alternatives. This is even more true for preventing heart attacks.
a) Eating a lot of foods high in fiber and soluble fiber such as beans, apples, oatmeal, nuts; peas, & barley; taking niacin; taking sterol supplements, particularly Beta Sitosterol, & eating foods that contain sterols will lower your LDL cholesterol as well as statins do. And, they have other health benefits instead of side effects.
(High doses of niacin can have side effects; & it is possible to eat so many high fiber foods you can literally get clogged up. But if you take less than 1,000 mg a day of niacin, side effects are rare. Even for more than that, getting the liver tests that statin drug takers have to get will catch any problems early. For most people even higher doses of niacin are safer by far than statin drugs.)
In addition, never eating transfats or hydrogenated vegetable oils PLUS getting regular exercise each week sharply lowers the small particle LDL that is one of the two kinds of LDL that actually produces heart attacks. To the best of my knowledge, no statin drug has been reported as having this effect.
Also, oxidized lipids, particularly oxidized LDL are likely to cause heart attacks. Eating a lot of fruits & vegetables that are high in antioxidants & taking antioxidant vitamins and other supplements, help prevent this oxidation. To the best of my knowledge, no statin drug has been reported as having this effect. (Modest amounts of vitamin A, vitamin C, natural vitamin E, Selenium in 200 microgram amounts, alpha lipoic acid, vegetables containing multiple carotenoids like carrots, sweet potatoes, yams, broccoli, squash, & greens all have antioxidant effects.)
High homocysteine levels such as levels well above 9.0 which is too high for good health are more predictive of heart attacks than LDL cholesterol as are low HDL levels. Some statins do increase HDL slightly; but they don’t lower high homocysteine. And, there are much safer ways to increase HDL that have other health benefits. In particular, niacin is more effective in increasing HDL than statins & is much safer to take.
Homocysteine & HDL each independently are better heart attack predictors than LDL cholesterol. Taking statins to lower LDL simply is no where near as effective in preventing heart disease and heart attacks as lowering homocysteine & increasing HDL. (We’ve done multiple posts on lowering homocysteine & increasing HDL because they are so important. So we don’t list how to do that here. But the info is available here in those posts.)
b) I’ve read some analysis that suggests that the little effectiveness that statins do have in preventing heart attacks is due to their effect in lowering inflammation.
I’m less versed in the natural methods to do that. But here is a list of the things I understand to be effective. Taking antioxidants & eating abundantly from the kinds of antioxidant rich fruits and vegetables while sharply reducing or eliminating foods like transfats or hydrogenated vegetable oils; high fructose corn syrup; sugar; & foods high in glycemic load such as corn flakes, cookies, crackers, & refined grains are the things I’ve read help reduce inflammation. Doing this list of things has a huge list of other health benefits including heart protection.
For example, this list of things plus regular strength training plus regular aerobic or cardio exercise all tend to sharply reduce obesity, insulin resistance, high glucose & HBA1C readings, & type II diabetes. These things are dramatically high risk in triggering heart attacks. And, statins don’t touch any of them that I’ve ever read about.
3. Taking statin drugs, specifically including Lipitor, has produced memory problems severe enough it has been mistakenly diagnosed as Alzheimer’s disease.
Ouch !!
I got an email from Bottom Line's Daily Health News that said that an ND they often quote as an expert had a patient with exactly that problem.
He then treated his patient’s heart risk with very much the same methods we just described above & discontinued the statin Lipitor his patient had begun to take at about the same time the memory problem started. (He states that this effect has been reported in people taking statins. I’ve also read that statins have been known to produce nerve damage which may be a related effect.)
The patient recovered his memory. And, based on our analysis above, his heart attack risk became MUCH, MUCH lower than it was while all he did was take Lipitor. (He also increased his patient’s intake of monosaturated oils and omega 3 oils. Both of these things tend to be heart protective.)
This ND thinks that many other drugs including tricyclic antidepressants; some medications for Parkinson's disease; narcotics such as OxyContin and Vicodin; over-the-counter antihistamines including Benadryl, Chlortrimaton and Tavist.
He said the effect all these drugs has is that they are anti-cholinergic. He said that anti-cholinergic drugs suppress the neurotransmitters that regulate
many components of mental functioning, particularly the ones involved with memory.
He said that a study published in the British Medical Journal found that 85% of older people who were taking anti-cholinergic drugs had memory impairment. (To be fair, he did not report the % of people that age who had memory impairment who were not.)
But the fact that these drugs have been shown to have this effect suggests avoiding them if you possibly can.
4. Your mitochondria are the power sources in your cells. If they are damaged, you lack energy, you feel rotten, your heart is sharply weakened, & I’ve read information that your risk of cancer goes up sharply.
So it’s very important to your quality of life & your health to keep your mitochondria healthy & avoid damaging them.
CoQ10 is a natural substance that benefits your mitochondria. Because it tends to be lower as you get older, it’s been found that people over 40 can improve their health and energy level & lower high blood pressure if they have it by taking 100 to 200 mg a day of CoQ10.
So, since statin drugs sharply lower your blood levels of CoQ10, it would be no surprise if it was found that taking statins damaged the mitochondria in the people taking statins.
Recently a study was reported that showed precisely that effect.:
Many drugs, particularly many statins, apparently damage the mitochondria
(From Reuters as I found it a few days ago on Yahoo Health News: )
New test shows source of disease side-effects
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor
Sun Feb 24, 5:40 PM ET (2008)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A new panel of tests aimed at finding out how drugs may damage cells has turned up a series of interactions that may explain some of the serious side-effects of statin drugs, researchers said on Sunday.
Statins, the wildly popular cholesterol-lowering drugs, may interact with at least one blood pressure drug to damage the mitochondria, the powerhouses of cells, the researchers reported in the journal Nature Biotechnology.
Their study also may lead to the development of drugs to treat diabetes and diseases of aging and better ways to screen for drug side-effects, the researchers said.
Vamsi Mootha of the Broad Institute at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said they had made their new database freely available to other scientists to use for screening drugs.
The mitochondria are structures in cells that make adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, which helps power cells. Mootha's team tested more than 2,000 drugs on cells to see how they might interfere with this process.
Their test looks at gene function, ATP levels and other measures of how well the mitochondria are working.
Many patients who take statins have reported side-effects that include muscle pain and weakness. The cause is not well understood but Mootha has long suspected the mitochondria are involved. The effects have been hard to pin down because studies of different groups have produced conflicting results.
Mootha's team said their findings showed some statins lower ATP levels and interfere with the mitochondria.
"Of the six statins present in our screening collection, three (fluvastatin, lovastatin and simvastatin) produced strong decreases in cellular ATP levels and (mitochondrial) activity," they wrote.
Fluvastatin is sold by Novartis under the brand name Lescol, lovastatin is sold under the brand name Mevacor and simvaststin is sold as Zocor.
PATTERN OF DYSFUNCTION
Three others -- atorvastatin, made by Pfizer under the brand name Lipitor, pravastatin or Pravachol, made by Bristol Myers Squibb and rosuvastatin, sold under the Crestor brand name by AstraZeneca -- had little effect, they said.
"We asked what pattern of dysfunction they cause in the mitochondria," Mootha said in a telephone interview. "Once we figured out what the pattern was we asked what other FDA-approved drugs give rise to that same pattern of mitochondrial dysfunction."
They found a few.
"We were struck by the fact that one of these nearest-neighbor drugs is propranolol, a widely used antihypertensive agent," they wrote.
Propranolol is a so-called beta blocker drug sold by Wyeth under the brand name Inderal and also available generically.
"That was a bit of a surprise," Mootha said. "And it is important because so many patients are on a statin as well as blood pressure medication."
Other drugs that resembled statins in their activity in mitochondria included amoxapine, cyclobenzaprine, griseofulvin, pentamidine, paclitaxel, propafenone, ethaverine, trimeprazine and amitriptyline.
A similar process may be going on in diabetes, nerve degeneration and aging, Mootha's team said. They found a number of drugs, including the cancer drug vinblastine may counter this process.
Mootha cautioned that his group has worked only in batches of muscle cells grown in the lab so far and that far more tests are needed.
(Editing by Bill Trott)
X * X* X* X
Certainly, the least that it would be prudent to do if you are taking statins to protect your heart and do not wish to stop is to do the other things in this post to reduce your heart attack risk and to take 100 to 200 mg a day of CoQ10.
And, this information suggests you may be safer to do those things and discontinue the statin drug.
I do believe, unlike some natural health writers, that lowering LDL is heart protective and that doctors who prescribe statins do so to protect your health.
But I do not believe statins are anywhere near as beneficial as most doctors have been trained to believe they are.
At best, you need to be very careful if you take them.
And, only taking statins is totally inadequate to protect your heart.
Today's post: Thursday, 2-28-2008
There are four reasons to avoid statin drugs if you can do so at all.
(Note that the most frightening ones are # 3 & # 4 in today’s post.) <<<<<
1. For their main purpose they are surprisingly weak compared to the impression most doctors now have of them. I read that of 100 people who take statins only about 1 of them will prevent a heart attack they otherwise would have had.
2. Even for their two main benefits, there are much safer alternatives. This is even more true for preventing heart attacks.
a) Eating a lot of foods high in fiber and soluble fiber such as beans, apples, oatmeal, nuts; peas, & barley; taking niacin; taking sterol supplements, particularly Beta Sitosterol, & eating foods that contain sterols will lower your LDL cholesterol as well as statins do. And, they have other health benefits instead of side effects.
(High doses of niacin can have side effects; & it is possible to eat so many high fiber foods you can literally get clogged up. But if you take less than 1,000 mg a day of niacin, side effects are rare. Even for more than that, getting the liver tests that statin drug takers have to get will catch any problems early. For most people even higher doses of niacin are safer by far than statin drugs.)
In addition, never eating transfats or hydrogenated vegetable oils PLUS getting regular exercise each week sharply lowers the small particle LDL that is one of the two kinds of LDL that actually produces heart attacks. To the best of my knowledge, no statin drug has been reported as having this effect.
Also, oxidized lipids, particularly oxidized LDL are likely to cause heart attacks. Eating a lot of fruits & vegetables that are high in antioxidants & taking antioxidant vitamins and other supplements, help prevent this oxidation. To the best of my knowledge, no statin drug has been reported as having this effect. (Modest amounts of vitamin A, vitamin C, natural vitamin E, Selenium in 200 microgram amounts, alpha lipoic acid, vegetables containing multiple carotenoids like carrots, sweet potatoes, yams, broccoli, squash, & greens all have antioxidant effects.)
High homocysteine levels such as levels well above 9.0 which is too high for good health are more predictive of heart attacks than LDL cholesterol as are low HDL levels. Some statins do increase HDL slightly; but they don’t lower high homocysteine. And, there are much safer ways to increase HDL that have other health benefits. In particular, niacin is more effective in increasing HDL than statins & is much safer to take.
Homocysteine & HDL each independently are better heart attack predictors than LDL cholesterol. Taking statins to lower LDL simply is no where near as effective in preventing heart disease and heart attacks as lowering homocysteine & increasing HDL. (We’ve done multiple posts on lowering homocysteine & increasing HDL because they are so important. So we don’t list how to do that here. But the info is available here in those posts.)
b) I’ve read some analysis that suggests that the little effectiveness that statins do have in preventing heart attacks is due to their effect in lowering inflammation.
I’m less versed in the natural methods to do that. But here is a list of the things I understand to be effective. Taking antioxidants & eating abundantly from the kinds of antioxidant rich fruits and vegetables while sharply reducing or eliminating foods like transfats or hydrogenated vegetable oils; high fructose corn syrup; sugar; & foods high in glycemic load such as corn flakes, cookies, crackers, & refined grains are the things I’ve read help reduce inflammation. Doing this list of things has a huge list of other health benefits including heart protection.
For example, this list of things plus regular strength training plus regular aerobic or cardio exercise all tend to sharply reduce obesity, insulin resistance, high glucose & HBA1C readings, & type II diabetes. These things are dramatically high risk in triggering heart attacks. And, statins don’t touch any of them that I’ve ever read about.
3. Taking statin drugs, specifically including Lipitor, has produced memory problems severe enough it has been mistakenly diagnosed as Alzheimer’s disease.
Ouch !!
I got an email from Bottom Line's Daily Health News that said that an ND they often quote as an expert had a patient with exactly that problem.
He then treated his patient’s heart risk with very much the same methods we just described above & discontinued the statin Lipitor his patient had begun to take at about the same time the memory problem started. (He states that this effect has been reported in people taking statins. I’ve also read that statins have been known to produce nerve damage which may be a related effect.)
The patient recovered his memory. And, based on our analysis above, his heart attack risk became MUCH, MUCH lower than it was while all he did was take Lipitor. (He also increased his patient’s intake of monosaturated oils and omega 3 oils. Both of these things tend to be heart protective.)
This ND thinks that many other drugs including tricyclic antidepressants; some medications for Parkinson's disease; narcotics such as OxyContin and Vicodin; over-the-counter antihistamines including Benadryl, Chlortrimaton and Tavist.
He said the effect all these drugs has is that they are anti-cholinergic. He said that anti-cholinergic drugs suppress the neurotransmitters that regulate
many components of mental functioning, particularly the ones involved with memory.
He said that a study published in the British Medical Journal found that 85% of older people who were taking anti-cholinergic drugs had memory impairment. (To be fair, he did not report the % of people that age who had memory impairment who were not.)
But the fact that these drugs have been shown to have this effect suggests avoiding them if you possibly can.
4. Your mitochondria are the power sources in your cells. If they are damaged, you lack energy, you feel rotten, your heart is sharply weakened, & I’ve read information that your risk of cancer goes up sharply.
So it’s very important to your quality of life & your health to keep your mitochondria healthy & avoid damaging them.
CoQ10 is a natural substance that benefits your mitochondria. Because it tends to be lower as you get older, it’s been found that people over 40 can improve their health and energy level & lower high blood pressure if they have it by taking 100 to 200 mg a day of CoQ10.
So, since statin drugs sharply lower your blood levels of CoQ10, it would be no surprise if it was found that taking statins damaged the mitochondria in the people taking statins.
Recently a study was reported that showed precisely that effect.:
Many drugs, particularly many statins, apparently damage the mitochondria
(From Reuters as I found it a few days ago on Yahoo Health News: )
New test shows source of disease side-effects
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor
Sun Feb 24, 5:40 PM ET (2008)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A new panel of tests aimed at finding out how drugs may damage cells has turned up a series of interactions that may explain some of the serious side-effects of statin drugs, researchers said on Sunday.
Statins, the wildly popular cholesterol-lowering drugs, may interact with at least one blood pressure drug to damage the mitochondria, the powerhouses of cells, the researchers reported in the journal Nature Biotechnology.
Their study also may lead to the development of drugs to treat diabetes and diseases of aging and better ways to screen for drug side-effects, the researchers said.
Vamsi Mootha of the Broad Institute at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said they had made their new database freely available to other scientists to use for screening drugs.
The mitochondria are structures in cells that make adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, which helps power cells. Mootha's team tested more than 2,000 drugs on cells to see how they might interfere with this process.
Their test looks at gene function, ATP levels and other measures of how well the mitochondria are working.
Many patients who take statins have reported side-effects that include muscle pain and weakness. The cause is not well understood but Mootha has long suspected the mitochondria are involved. The effects have been hard to pin down because studies of different groups have produced conflicting results.
Mootha's team said their findings showed some statins lower ATP levels and interfere with the mitochondria.
"Of the six statins present in our screening collection, three (fluvastatin, lovastatin and simvastatin) produced strong decreases in cellular ATP levels and (mitochondrial) activity," they wrote.
Fluvastatin is sold by Novartis under the brand name Lescol, lovastatin is sold under the brand name Mevacor and simvaststin is sold as Zocor.
PATTERN OF DYSFUNCTION
Three others -- atorvastatin, made by Pfizer under the brand name Lipitor, pravastatin or Pravachol, made by Bristol Myers Squibb and rosuvastatin, sold under the Crestor brand name by AstraZeneca -- had little effect, they said.
"We asked what pattern of dysfunction they cause in the mitochondria," Mootha said in a telephone interview. "Once we figured out what the pattern was we asked what other FDA-approved drugs give rise to that same pattern of mitochondrial dysfunction."
They found a few.
"We were struck by the fact that one of these nearest-neighbor drugs is propranolol, a widely used antihypertensive agent," they wrote.
Propranolol is a so-called beta blocker drug sold by Wyeth under the brand name Inderal and also available generically.
"That was a bit of a surprise," Mootha said. "And it is important because so many patients are on a statin as well as blood pressure medication."
Other drugs that resembled statins in their activity in mitochondria included amoxapine, cyclobenzaprine, griseofulvin, pentamidine, paclitaxel, propafenone, ethaverine, trimeprazine and amitriptyline.
A similar process may be going on in diabetes, nerve degeneration and aging, Mootha's team said. They found a number of drugs, including the cancer drug vinblastine may counter this process.
Mootha cautioned that his group has worked only in batches of muscle cells grown in the lab so far and that far more tests are needed.
(Editing by Bill Trott)
X * X* X* X
Certainly, the least that it would be prudent to do if you are taking statins to protect your heart and do not wish to stop is to do the other things in this post to reduce your heart attack risk and to take 100 to 200 mg a day of CoQ10.
And, this information suggests you may be safer to do those things and discontinue the statin drug.
I do believe, unlike some natural health writers, that lowering LDL is heart protective and that doctors who prescribe statins do so to protect your health.
But I do not believe statins are anywhere near as beneficial as most doctors have been trained to believe they are.
At best, you need to be very careful if you take them.
And, only taking statins is totally inadequate to protect your heart.
Labels: heart disease, heart health; preventing heart attacks, low energy, memory loss, side effect of statins, slow aging, statin drugs, statins
posted by David at 2:32 PM
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