Statins review says benefits 'underestimated'

[goldent]

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-37306736

Prof Collins said: "Our review shows that the numbers of people who avoid heart attacks and strokes by taking statin therapy are very much larger than the numbers who have side effects with it.

"In addition, whereas most of the side effects can be reversed with no residual effects by stopping the statin, the effects of a heart attack or stroke not being prevented are irreversible and can be devastating.

"Consequently, there is a serious cost to public health from making misleading claims about high side effect rates that inappropriately dissuade people from taking statin therapy despite the proven benefits."

[napi21]

1. My husband has been on Lipitor for 15 years and I believe it has stabilized his

triglycerides. He's not had any side effects and I thank the researchers for discovering it helpful attributes.

Having said that, the pharma's that are selling drugs like this certainly deserve to be profitable, BUT "NOT BILLION ARES AT THE EXPENSE OF THEIR CUSTOMERS"! Making the cost of some of their products un affordable for the people that need them, sometimes just to stay alive, is pure greed and shouldn't be tolerated.

[goldent]

2. I'm on a Lipitor generic

The Lipitor patent expired Nov 2011 and the prices really came down for me.

[safeinOhio]

8. Free at Miejer's in the Mid-West.

I now shop there because of my free pills.

[still_one]

4. Lipitor has been generic for a while, atorvastin, and is not expensive at all. That is not

meant to detract from your point on the exorbitant costs of many new drugs, but lipitor isn't one of them

[Warpy]

5. I have several friends with genetically determined cholesterol >350

who are alive in their 60s and 70s because the first statin, Mevacor, came out in their 40s, just about the age their parents and grandparents and other extended family had died of cardiovascular events. Statin drugs are proven life extenders.

I do have to worry about greed being a factor when I see people with no cardiac history in themselves or their families and with normal cholesterol being put on the stuff "just in case." I am not sure the risk versus benefit equation holds up in their case.

However, anyone with risk factors for cardiovascular disease should probably at least have a trial to see if they can tolerate it. I

[Wilms]

3. It's Not Dementia, It's Your Heart Medication: Cholesterol Drugs and Memory

snip

Two small trials published in 2000 and 2004 by Matthew Muldoon, a clinical pharmacologist at the University of Pittsburgh, seem to suggest a link between statins and cognitive problems. The first, which enrolled 209 high-cholesterol subjects, reported that participants taking placebo pills improved more on repeated tests of attention and reaction time taken over the course of six months—presumably getting better because of practice, as people typically do. Subjects who were on statins, however, did not show the normal improvement—suggesting their learning was impaired. The second trial reported similar findings. And a study published in 2003 in Reviews of Therapeutics noted that among 60 statin users who had reported memory problems to MedWatch, more than half said their symptoms improved when they stopped taking the drugs.

snip

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-not-dementia-its-your-heart-medication/

[still_one]

6. This is not necessarily the case. Regardless, it is always a risk/reward situation

"Researchers at Rutgers and the University of Pennsylvania looked at 482,542 new statin users and compared them to an equal number of people who were not taking any cholesterol-lowering drugs. Additionally, new statin users were also compared to another 26,484 people taking nonstatin lipid-lowering drugs (LLDs).

The results, published today in The Journal of the American Medical Association-Internal Medicine, showed that more patients taking statins did indeed report short-term memory loss in the 30-day period after first taking the drug when compared to people not taking any cholesterol-lowering drugs. However, the same was true for patients taking nonstatin LLDs.

"These are drugs that work by completely different mechanisms, and it's not biologically plausible that they'd have the same effects," lead study author Dr. Brian Strom, chancellor of Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences, told CBS News.

Strom's conclusion then was that statins do not cause memory loss, but people are more likely to recognize health problems when they start a new drug -- a so-called "detection bias."

"People have memory problems all the time," he said. "You lose your keys. You forget somebody's name. When you get put on a new drug you're more likely to blame it on the drug you just took."

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/statins-and-memory-loss-should-you-worry/

What they need is a good double blind study to show if their is a correlation, and a lot of variables need to be factored in, since memory loss can be influenced by a lot of things, including aging, genetics, etc.

[goldent]

9. You are right it is risk/reward

although in the case of statins it has been found to very safe. In the UK a "scare" article about statins had this effect:

The public controversy over statins after a leading medical journal ran articles questioning their use will have prompted an estimated 200,000 people in the UK to stop taking the pills in a six-month period, according to researchers.

The authors of a study funded by the British Heart Foundation say there could be 2,000 extra heart attacks or strokes over the following 10 years as a consequence, but say it is impossible to be certain.

[still_one]

10. Statins have been in use for decades, and most of the millions who have been

taking them for years have done just fine.

While the are some who cannot tolerate statins, the vast majority have no issues

I think you assessment is right on.

[True Dough]

7. My dad turns 69 in November

He's been on statins for close to 15 years, since he suffered a heart attack that led to a quadruple bypass. He started out on Lipitor, I believe, but was switched to Crestor several years ago. He continued to smoke for most of that time (finally stopped for good, I hope, almost a year ago) and his poor eating habits have only improved modestly. He has had an angioplasty and a stent inserted in the intervening years, but I wonder if he'd still be around today if it wasn't for the cholesterol drugs.