| A Courtesy of Healing Touch Chiropractic and Dr. Gary L. Easter How Safe and Effective is your cholesterol lowering prescription?
Statins, one of the main classes of cholesterol-lowering drugs, were prescribed almost 100 million times in the USA last year, reports IMS Health. Drugs included in this class include
Dr. Antonio M. Gotto, Jr., dean and medical provost of Cornell University Medical College, New York, New York, told a press conference that he favored this class of drugs for all men aged more than 45 and women aged 55 plus who had a total cholesterol of more than 200 mg/dL, an HDL cholesterol of less than 50 mg/dL and one other risk factor for coronary heart disease.
Dangers of statin drugs include, but are not limited to, a potential increase in liver enzymes so patients must be monitored for normal liver function muscle aches, weakness, immune system suppression(1), an increase in cancer risk, (2) and a serious degenerative muscle tissue condition called rhabdomyolysis. But suppose that lowering your “bad” (LDL) cholesterol was not actually the key to lowering your risk of heart attacks and heart disease? Would you still want to risk all of those statin side effects? Well, this is just what several research studies have found, raising the basic question of whether statin drugs even work to lower the risk of heart disease. One study, published in the August 2003 American Journal of Cardiology found that lowering bad cholesterol with statin drugs may not reduce the rate at which plaque builds up in the arteries surrounding the heart. This finding flies in the face of the widespread belief that lowering LDL cholesterol levels is the best way to reduce arterial plaque. In the study, participants taking varying doses of a statin did generally lower their cholesterol. However, all the groups had an average increase in arterial plaque of 9.2 percent. Another study published in the December 2002 Journal of the American Medical Association looked at the effect of statin drugs versus usual care (improving diet, exercise, etc.). While the statin group did lower their bad cholesterol levels significantly more than the usual care group, both groups had the SAME rates of death and heart disease.
In light of these reports, and the known dangers of statin drugs, you would expect some major news in the area of statins, but the studies received hardly any mainstream media coverage. As with many health care issues, you'll have to sort out the truth for yourself.
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