One of my major complaints about medicine and health is that consumers are not making informed choices.  I'm convinced and my experience has shown that many people will choose to adopt a program of dietary excellence and optimal habits if they are shown both efficacy of that plan, as well as the dangers of pharmaceutical intervention.  The problem is that most people are not being given this information.  This is particularly true for statin drugs, prescribed for lowering cholesterol.

A recent analysis of 23 large clinical trials involving statin drugs appeared in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.*  The authors had no financial connections to drug companies.

Statin drugs are known to cause liver damage, which is identified through blood tests.  When liver cells die, liver enzymes are released, so elevated blood enzyme levels are indicative of damage.  In this analysis, the higher the dose of the statin drug prescribed, the greater the percentage of patients with liver damage.  For example, high-dose Lipitor caused 4 times more liver injuries than low-dose Lipitor in one study and 5.5 times greater in another study.  Millions of patients are given these drugs in high doses, which means that hundreds of thousands of patients are likely to develop liver injuries, some of them permanent, as a result.  

The same held true with muscle pain and weakness, a condition known as rhabdomyolysis.  The rate of rhabdomyolysis, which can also cause kidney injury, kidney failure and death, was more than 7 times greater with high-dose Zocor than lower doses.

The most disturbing correlation, however, was statin use and cancer.  The authors noted that "there was a highly significant inverse relationship between achieved LDL levels and rates of newly diagnosed cancer."  We know from research such as that reported in The China Study that lower cholesterol levels are actually correlated with lower cancer rates, which means that the causative effect in these studies has to be the increasing doses of statin drugs required to achieve lower LDL levels in these patients.  

The risks associated with statin drugs are significant and unnecessary, in view of the fact that cholesterol can be lowered as quickly and sometimes more so with diet and lifestyle.  

*Alsheikh-Ali, AA, et al, "Effect of the magnitude of lipid lowering on risk of elevated liver enzymes, rhabdomyolysis, and cancer," Journal of the American College of Cardiology 2007;50:419-20.