I have high hereditary LDL cholesterol and am at risk for glaucoma. I can handle only the only dose statin. Any more causes a lot of pain and muscle spasms.
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Taking statins caused my legs to ache. I stopped taking them. My current medication for hereditary high cholesterol also has nasty side effects. What to do?
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I totally agree with Dr R's response to this article, although I very much doubt that it is the publication that would be compensated. This is the second article by Nicholas Bakalar in two weeks promoting statins. My friends and family members who have been prescribed statins by their doctors have suffered from incapacitating symptoms and have had to be taken off statins, as many of the responders to the last article on the subject have written.
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1000 percent. Statins are downright DANGEROUS. Period!
I can’t help wondering if this publication gets some sort of remuneration from articles like this - an ad for statins. It is ironic that in the same days publication the horrors of generic drugs are exposed rightfully while the risks of statins are glossed over in a facile puff piece. Perhaps I expect too much.
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Really tired of medical articles that “may” help a condition. Isn’t this laudatory article a little premature? Medical advice should be based on facts, not supposition.
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@Sally
Glad to read that others have observed the "may" word doctors so frequently use. My other favorites are "associated with" and "we think". I can usually get at the truth when I ask "is that a cause and effect result?" and the answer is always "no" and then I move on.
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@Sally
The last sentence in the article is the most important one.
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I guess it is to be expected that the largest selling drug in history wants to organize public pep rallies to kill all forms of Statin Trutherism.
Calling this a "study" verges on farce, tho.
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"More good news about cholesterol-lowering statin drugs"?...Really?
The second to last sentence says statins should not be started to treat glaucoma...wise.
As to whether statins prolong life and prevent coronary problems:
Please consider this article (edited for brevity): BMJ 2016; 353:i1246 'Re-evaluation of the traditional diet-heart hypothesis: analysis of recovered data from Minnesota Coronary Experiment.' Please note the 10 experts who did this analysis. You'll note that this was recovered data that was shelved, because as the author notes, the investigators went into study with a "prespecified hypothosis", wanting to prove your assertion stated above. You'll note Kaplan Meier graphs "show no mortality benefit for the intervention group...There WAS a 22% HIGHER RISK OF DEATH for each 30mg/dL reduction in serum cholesterol...There was no evidence of benefit in the intervention group for coronary atherosclerosis of myocardial infarcts...cholesterol lowering interventions showed no evidence of benefit on mortality from coronary heart disease...evidence...shows that [lowering] serum cholesterol...does not support the hypothesis that this translates to a lower risk of death from coronary heart disease. The authors noted that "incomplete publication" (cherry picking data) contributed to "overestimation" of the benefits they were hoping to prove, although the data proved otherwise.
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The risks of taking statins are well known and understood and they are pretty minimal at the lower dosage ranges. However, these putative benefits keep being reported with hypothetical mechanisms like maintaining better blood circulation and anti-inflammatory properties. If these effects are true, I would like to see whether statins actually prolong life and more importantly, the quality of life.
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Many articles about statins, like this one, tend to accentuate the positive. The downsides of statins are well-documented and should be presented alongside any supposed benefits of those drugs.
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When will you cover the patients who take statins and develop muscle pain that does not always go away once stopping the drug? Polymyalgia is hard to treat, especially in seniors, and being unable to lift one’s arms or bend one’s knees is quite a valid reason for discontinuing. This keeps getting glossed over in the breathless coverage of these drugs. Stating that these effects are “rare” does nothing for the people who experience it. And if that side effect is so rare, I must have won a strange lottery because I know 4 people who went through this - some never got fully recovery.
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