New information on statin drugs....

Today's post: Thursday, 7-24-2008

Recently, I had an opportunity to read an interview by fitness expert, Jon Benson, with a Doctor Graveline who worked at NASA.

It seems that when he was given a statin drug, he suddenly developed total amnesia for his life after he was about 13 years old. Since he was married with several kids and the time period that went missing had all his professional training, that was embarrassing and threatened to make him nearly unemployable.

Needless to say, when he did, mercifully, regain his memory after the other doctor who put him on the statin drug took him off of it, Dr Graveline decided he’d better research statin side-effects in detail.

He discovered the fact that statin drugs deplete CoQ10 and a class of cellular messengers called dolichols. (Dolichols I just heard of from this interview and know nothing about. But CoQ10 depletion HARMS your heart, reduces the energy and energy processing in all your cells, and makes you feel tired and de-energized as a result.)

And, he discovered that other people had developed the sudden amnesia he did. But he also found that many people developed aches and pains and muscle injuries after they started taking statin drugs.

However, he also found that unlike his own experience, when most of those people stopped taking statins, their amnesia, aches and pains, and muscle injuries were permanent and irreversible.

Then he found that the majority of the positive effect of statins on reducing heart attacks was from their effect at lowering the kind of inflammation measured by the C-Reactive Protein, or CRP or HS CRP tests. It was not due very much to their lowering of LDL cholesterol, although they did do that.

He then found that statins have this anti-inflammatory effect at much lower doses than other doctors were prescribing for LDL lowering. In addition, he found that taking statins at these much lower doses AND also taking purified fish oil supplements or eating wild caught fish high in omega 3’s worked even better at lowering CRP levels.

As we’ve posted on before here, there are a great many other factors besides total LDL levels that are much more causative & predictive of heart & cardiovascular disease. And, eating right, taking sterol supplements, and taking niacin will reliably lower high LDL levels with no statin drugs needed. In addition, eating right and taking niacin improves many of the other factors that are more important than total LDL, such as increasing HDL and lowering triglycerides and preventing high blood sugar.

The other piece of news on statin drugs is that it may soon be possible to do a test of your genetic profile to see if you have either a single gene that would predispose you to one kind of statin side effect, or if you have two of these genes, or none.

(Since even the people who have two of these genes do not all report side effects, there are clearly other factors that are protective, such as CoQ10 intake, and likely other genes that predispose you to harmful side effects from statins.)

So, the bottom line is that statins, particularly in high doses, are a good bit less safe than most of the doctors prescribing them realize. And, as many doctors now prescribe them, they are often not needed. Further, prescribing statins without also prescribing 90 to 200 mg a day of CoQ10 is a dangerous and ignorant practice that is often harmful to the people taking it and to their quality of life.

It seems that high doses of statins are not necessary for protecting your heart in most cases. And, if your LDL is high and your CRP is normal, statins may not be a good choice to bring down your LDL levels or to take at all.

You run the risk of irreversible side effects when there are more important things to check and do to protect your heart. And, you can bring down high LDL readings, particularly amount of the truly dangerous small particle LDL in your blood with far less dangerous methods.

(See our recent post: 10th way to health & longevity....
Get your blood biomarkers tested regularly & know how to correct bad readings and do it if bad readings do turn up. – from: Monday, 7-14-2008.)


Plus if your CRP IS high, it may make sense to try first boosting your omega 3 intake; reducing your omega 6 intake by eating no refined grain foods, eating animals that are naturally fed instead of grain fed (wild caught instead of farmed fish, grass fed beef, pasture fed poultry.), & using olive oil or extra virgin olive oil instead of corn oil or safflower oil or soy oil; eliminating high fructose corn syrup, and minimizing sugar intake.

(All those steps have other health benefits, including helping you to lose or avoid putting on excess bodyfat.)

Then, & only then, if you still have an elevated CRP reading, it may make sense to add a LOW dose statin drug. And, if you do that, the evidence I’ve seen suggests you would do well to also take 100 or 200 mg a day of C0Q10.


That having been said most doctors have not yet learned many of these things. They know, accurately in my view, that LDL readings of over 129 are somewhat dangerous & that LDL readings of 160 and up are dangerous.

And, they know that statin drugs have some heart attack preventive effect and do, at least, lower your total LDL readings.

Plus, they are unfamiliar with the other ways of lowering LDL or have not seen the evidence, as I have, that those methods work well to bring down LDL readings that are too high.

And, they know how to prescribe statin drugs.

So, it is understandable that many of them will prescribe statin drugs. Many will even insist on it.

Sometimes this may be the right thing to do, particularly for people who have very high CRP readings.

But it looks like this may be a bad idea for most people otherwise.