Statins, the medications that lower cholesterol, have long been the golden child of the medical community. Natural substances like plant sterols, red yeast rice extract and bergamot together with exercise and the cholesterol-lowering diet described by American cardiologist, Dean Ornish, have some impact on diminishing cholesterol levels but the effect is not as significant as the power of statins, which reduce cholesterol quite substantially.
Such is the cache of this medication that many cardiologists, whose risk of having a heart attack is minimal, take statins every day with the firm conviction that it provides them with added protection against the development of heart disease. Give them half a chance and they would insert these pharmaceuticals into our water supply.
The major caveat which has riled the cardiologists have been reports about the myriad side effects of these drugs including muscle aches, headaches, memory loss, fatigue, digestive upsets, sexual dysfunction, depression, nerve damage, insomnia, raised blood sugar levels, interstitial lung disease, kidney injury, pancreatitis and adverse effects on the liver. Their riposte has been that many of these unfavourable reactions have been exaggerated and might even be imaginary.
In an attempt to vindicate the statins a group of experts set out to collect and analyse the research which has documented all the harmful effects of these medications and their findings were recently released in a medical publication called, ‘The Lancet,’ a highly reputable journal. The results indicate that taking statins does not lead to sleep disturbance, memory loss, sexual dysfunction, depression, and interstitial lung disease but they do cause muscle pain, have adverse effects on the liver, raise blood sugar levels and can result in excess amounts of protein in the urine and oedema or fluid retention which might reflect some negative effects on the kidneys.
Just how beneficial then are the statins given these reservations. The experts who conducted the above analysis stand by their endorsement of this medication asserting that statin use has contributed ‘substantively to reductions in global cardiovascular disease.’ However a communication to doctors Australia wide on the Royal Australian College of General Practitioner’s website found a ‘surprisingly weak and inconsistent relationship between the degree of reduction in LDL cholesterol from taking statins and a person’s chance of having a heart attack or stroke, or dying.’ The ‘absolute risk reduction of dying, having a heart attack or stroke was 0.8%, 1.3% and 0.4% respectively, ‘which they considered to be modest. Whether this would attenuate the commitment of the cardiologists and other medical practitioners to prescribe them extensively is highly unlikely.
