Statins may help cause ALS....

Today's post: Thursday, 3-19-2008

Other than the diseases that produce quick death or severe pain, ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, is one of the nastiest & most scary.

You can think & feel just fine. But your nerve commands to your muscles to move simply gradually stop working. You gradually become a prisoner in an inert body you cannot move in any way. Think of a string puppet with ALL the strings cut.

Frankly, any drug that can have causing this as a side effect is one I hope never to need to take or have prescribed to me without my knowing of this side effect.

I definitely would do EVERYTHING else to treat a problem to avoid taking such a drug.

I knew that statin drugs are often unnecessary as there are better & much safer ways to protect your heart & to lower your LDL cholesterol. (I use them & my last LDL reading was 93.) And, I knew that statins tend to produce cellular damage to your mitochondria by slashing your blood levels of CoQ10 that tends to protect & energize them.

(See my earlier & related post: Why avoid statins if you can....Thursday, 2-28-2008
& my regular posts on information on how to protect your heart & increase your HDL and lower your homocysteine levels because doing so protects your heart.)

But, although I had seen a bit that statins have produced pain by causing nerve damage, I had never heard this nerve damage can also cause ALS in some people.

So, I think the following article is important.:

(This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, the Internet’s most popular health, wealth, and success e-zine. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com. )

“One Damn Good Reason to Avoid Cholesterol-Lowering Drugs

By Shane "The People's Chemist" Ellison, M.Sc.

I've been called a lot of things. Science Nerd... Professor... and Cholesterol-Lowering Drug Nazi are among those that can be mentioned here. The only one I'll admit to is being a Cholesterol-Lowering Drug Nazi.

Cholesterol-lowering drugs (statins) amass billions of dollars each year pretending to be a safe and effective way to protect against heart disease. Yet science shows that these drugs represent a clear and present danger to your health. In addition to lowering cholesterol, they elicit some really nasty side effects. Lou Gehrig's Disease (ALS) is just one of them.

ALS occurs when cells of the nervous system (brain and spinal chord) become inactive. This can be caused by many cellular dysfunctions. But it's usually from a protein entanglement within the nerve cell. Once tangled, these cells can no longer pass electrical messages through the body, resulting in a loss of voluntary muscle control. As time passes, muscle wasting (a Science Nerd would call it "atrophy") develops. Victims of ALS usually die from the inability to breathe when muscle loss has reached an extreme.

The national average of those who suffer from ALS is a mere .0005 percent. But - sit down for this one - among those who reported suffering from "drug-induced ALS," nearly a third were using cholesterol-lowering drugs! Apparently, this class of drugs can "tangle" something known as "tau proteins."

But protecting yourself from premature heart disease does not mean you have to put yourself at risk of wiping out your nervous system. You can do it with four simple tactics: Minimize your sugar intake, take part in interval training, maintain healthy vitamin D levels by spending time in the sun, and supplement with fish oil to boost your omega-3 levels.

[Ed. Note: Shane Ellison (www.thepeopleschemist.com) is an author, organic chemist, and contributor to ETR's free natural health newsletter. He is a two-time recipient of the prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute Research Grant for his research in biochemistry and physiology. An internationally recognized authority on therapeutic nutrition, he is the founder of The AM-PM Fat Loss Discovery package.”

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You can, & I think should, do a great deal more to protect yourself from heart disease than his short list. (We have done & will continue to do posts on the many other ways to protect your heart.) And, you can also take 2,000 or so iu of vitamin D3 at times you cannot get tons of sun exposure. We now know getting enough vitamin D in these ways has many kinds of health benefits.

But doing the things on his list IS heart protective. If you do the other things to protect your heart first & take it easy and progress a bit slowly, you can do vigorous interval training safely in most cases. And, it will help increase your HDL & lower your triglyceride levels – both of which tend to prevent heart disease by keeping your arteries clear of plaque. And, eating minimal sugar and getting enough omega 3 oils are both heart protective things you can do.

Doing the things on his short list has many other health benefits as well.

The best doctors I know & who have patients who no longer get repeat heart attacks only use statin drugs now for the worst & sickest heart patients. They know how to reverse heart disease, lower LDL cholesterol, & prevent heart attacks without using statins -- & without the side effects of statin drugs.

Who might be a good candidate for statin drugs for such a doctor? Someone who already has heart disease or smokes heavily or has many severe risk factors at once AND who also has LDL cholesterol of WAY over 160 might get a prescription for statin drugs from them & do often in fact get them. Their other patients do not because these doctors know better ways to treat their less worse off patients.

(See: The Sinatra Solution: New Hope for Preventing and Treating Heart Disease by Stephen T., M.D. Sinatra and James C. Roberts - & keeping reading our posts for these other methods.)