New Scientist
For those who read New Scientist, in this weeks edition there is an interesting article on statins. Unfortunately I can't provide a link to the article (its behind a pay-wall) but I can give a few headlines.
“140 low-risk people must be treated with statins for five years to prevent one major coronary event or stroke”. Not only that, but there was no reduction in the overall mortality rate from all causes in that period.
but
even these figures, extrapolated to whole populations, equate to hundreds of thousands of people avoiding heart attacks.
the author comments
I felt fit as a fiddle at the time of my diagnosis, but better safe than sorry – or dead. So I started popping a daily statin as my consultant recommended. At first it was fine. I even did another triathlon. But a year later, exercise was getting harder. I was slower on the football pitch. I couldn’t lift the weights I used to. If I did a lot of exercise in a day – two hours, say – I would end the evening curled up in a ball on the sofa, in flu-like muscle pain.
and
After two years on statins I had stopped going to the gym. I gave up running. I cut down on swimming. I simply couldn’t bear the pain – or the humiliation of being so weak and sluggish. In the end, I told my doctor I wanted to stop taking statins because they were turning me into a couch potato. Surely that was as bad for me as having high cholesterol?
in one study based in Paris, 87 per cent of participants [in statins] complained of pain. Last year, David Spence and George Dresser at the University of Western Ontario in Canada wrote in the Journal of the American Heart Association that, despite claims from clinical trial data that adverse reactions are vanishingly rare, “in real-world practice, myalgia and cramps are more common than estimated from clinical trials“.
Over all, the article makes no firm conclusions but suggests that if you are otherwise healthy, apart from raised cholesterol, taking statins is unlikely to do you as an individual much good, though it may. Also, the article suggests that side effects are more common than generally accepted.
Treat yourself to a copy of New Scientist to read the full article.
