Taking Statin Drugs to Lower Cholesterol May Not Be Enough to Prevent Heart Disease

It’s a common scenario that happens to thousands of people when they go to see their doctor. He runs some blood tests and then tells you that your cholesterol is too high, recommends that you change your diet, exercise more, and then puts you on a statin-type cholesterol lowering drug. There may also be some dire warnings on how important it is to keep the “bad” cholesterol in check to prevent heart disease.

Recommended “normal” cholesterol levels have changed over the years. About 25 years ago, at the time of the famous Framingham Heart Study, normal cholesterol levels for someone aged 50 were 150-310 mg/dl. Now, levels more than 200 are considered high for all age groups.

New federal guidelines say that over 49 million Americans have cholesterol levels that are high enough to require treatment with statin drugs like Lipitor. As you can imagine, this translates into billions of dollars of extra cost to consumers and billions of dollars of extra profit for the pharmaceutical companies. The question to be asked is: Does the new guidelines really help the patients and can the recommendations be based on compromised research?

What a lot of people don’t know is that most of the experts on the panel for the National Cholesterol Education Program, which sets the federal guidelines and recommendations for physicians, were on the payroll of the pharmaceutical companies making the statin drugs. The results of the study may be compromised by this fact alone.

There are risks involved in lowering cholesterol for the sake of lowering cholesterol alone. Lowering cholesterol has been associated with sudden death in elderly patients, strokes, and no significant change in mortality rates. Some additional effects may include liver and muscle problems, memory loss and amnesia, depression and neuropathy.