When thinking about whether you should take statins for high cholesterol, ask yourself these questions:. It's important to consider your medical reasons, personal values, lifestyle choices and any concerns when choosing a treatment. Talk to your doctor about your total risk of heart and blood vessel disease and personal preferences before making a decision about statin therapy. There is a problem with information submitted for this request.
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Please try again. Something went wrong on our side, please try again. Show references Cholesterol medications. Having too much cholesterol in your blood increases your risk of heart attacks and strokes.
Statins block a substance your liver needs to make cholesterol. This causes your liver to remove cholesterol from your blood. If you think you're experiencing side effects from statins, don't just stop taking the pills. Talk to your doctor to see if a change of dosage or even a different type of medication might be helpful. One of the most common complaints of people taking statins is muscle pain. You may feel this pain as a soreness, tiredness or weakness in your muscles.
The pain can be a mild discomfort, or it can be severe enough to make your daily activities difficult. However, researchers have found a "nocebo" effect when it comes to perceived muscle pain and statins. A "nocebo" effect means people who have negative expectations about a medication report experiencing the potential side effect at higher rates than the drug should cause. The actual risk of developing muscle pain as a result of taking statins is about 5 percent or less compared with taking a pill that doesn't contain medication placebo.
However, studies have found that nearly 30 percent of people stopped taking the pills because of muscle aches even when they were taking a placebo. A strong predictor you'll experience muscle aches when taking statins could be whether or not you read about the potential side effect.
Very rarely, statins can cause life-threatening muscle damage called rhabdomyolysis rab-doe-my-OL-ih-sis. Rhabdomyolysis can cause severe muscle pain, liver damage, kidney failure and death.
The risk of very serious side effects is extremely low, and calculated in a few cases per million people taking statins. Rhabdomyolysis can occur when you take statins in combination with certain drugs or if you take a high dose of statins.
Occasionally, statin use could cause an increase in the level of enzymes that signal liver inflammation. If the increase is only mild, you can continue to take the drug. Rarely, if the increase is severe, you may need to try a different statin.
Although liver problems are rare, your doctor may order a liver enzyme test before or shortly after you begin to take a statin. You wouldn't need any additional liver enzyme tests unless you begin to have signs or symptoms of trouble with your liver. Contact your doctor immediately if you have unusual fatigue or weakness, loss of appetite, pain in your upper abdomen, dark-colored urine, or yellowing of your skin or eyes.
It's possible your blood sugar blood glucose level may increase when you take a statin, which may lead to developing type 2 diabetes. The risk is small but important enough that the Food and Drug Administration FDA has issued a warning on statin labels regarding blood glucose levels and diabetes.
The increase generally occurs when blood sugar levels are already higher than normal and fall in the prediabetes or diabetes range when you begin taking a statin. Statins prevent heart attacks in people with diabetes, so the relevance of the mild increase in sugar values with statins observed in some people is unclear. The benefit of taking statins likely outweighs the small risk to have the blood sugar level go up.
Talk to your doctor if you have concerns. The FDA warns on statin labels that some people have developed memory loss or confusion while taking statins. These side effects reverse once you stop taking the medication. There is limited evidence to prove a cause-effect relationship, but talk to your doctor if you experience memory loss or confusion while taking statins.
There has also been evidence that statins may help with brain function — in people with dementia, for example. But in fact, the brain makes its own cholesterol. If anything, long-term use of statins might have a beneficial effect on the brain since they help prevent strokes and protect the health of arteries in the brain. Truth: Some studies have indicated that there may be a relationship between statin drugs and an increased risk for developing cataracts.
However, these investigations have been either conducted in animals or in less-than-rigorous studies. The best evidence we have comes from high-quality clinical trials in humans, which showed that statin drugs do not increase risk of cataract formation, reports Martin.
Healthy UH. View more from this blog. Research has shown that statins are highly effective in reducing the risk of fatal heart attack and stroke. But some people are reluctant to take these life-saving drugs. They worry about taking medicine every day for the rest of their life or have heard that statins have undesirable side effects. What does science have to say about these concerns and others surrounding statins? High cholesterol. You know, I always figured I would eventually get it.
And then I would officially say that I'm old. Well, I'm not that old. And I do have high cholesterol. I've had high cholesterol for years, actually. And we both know it's not really all about age, right? I mean, genetics play a big part in high cholesterol, too. Now, I want it to be lower, but I'm also not sure I want to be on medication the rest of my life. And this is Healthy UH. You know, it's interesting. I found some things about this medication. Before we continue talking about it, we should mention, though, that we are on Zoom for this podcast.
We're trying our best to stay safe and away from each other. So, bear with us if the quality is a little Zoom-ish. There's a lot of information out there that would make people want to shy away from statins. I've heard they affect memory, muscles, even your chances of getting diabetes. These are commonly prescribed medications, but the more I looked into it, I wondered if they really should be.
Joining us today is Dr. Ian Neeland. First, thanks for joining us, Dr. Let's talk about what cholesterol is exactly. I mean, we all have it. What purpose does it serve in our bodies? Well, cholesterol is a fat-like, waxy substance that helps your body make cell membranes, many hormones and vitamin D.
So, it's a very important component of the body's metabolism. And the cholesterol in your blood comes from two sources: the foods you eat and your liver. Your liver actually makes all the cholesterol your body needs. So, any excess cholesterol you get in your diet is on top of what your needs really are. Now, cholesterol and other fats are carried in your bloodstream as round particles called lipoproteins. And the two most commonly known lipoproteins are low density lipoproteins or LDL and high density lipoproteins or HDL.
Now, you may have heard of these terms. LDL or bad cholesterol to contribute to the formation of plaque buildup in the arteries. That's called atherosclerosis. And this is linked to higher risk for heart disease and stroke. On the other hand, HDL stands for high density lipoprotein, and that's considered a good cholesterol. Now, HDL levels should be around 50 milligrams per deciliter in an individual, but you can raise your HDL by several means, including exercising for at least 30 minutes five times a week, quitting smoking, avoiding saturated fats and losing weight.
So, there are medications out there that can lower our LDL or bad cholesterol sometimes by 50 percent. So, I guess the question is, why wouldn't we take these medications? I heard one of your presentations that an Internet search of statin myths turned up 30 million results online.
So, before we break down some of those myths, I guess the first question is why is there so much negativity about them? Well, you know, I think there's a lot of misinformation out there on the Internet.
And people are really confused about what's true, what's a myth. And then they don't necessarily speak to their doctors about these questions all the time.
So, I think that it's really important to get the facts straight. Now, I do think there is, you know, generally a low desire to take medications long-term in most people. And also, I've heard, you know, because the medicine doesn't make you feel any differently, why should I take it?
Many people have that myth. And the other thing is that a lot of people think that once your cholesterol is better on a statin that you can stop taking the statin. Unfortunately, what happens is your cholesterol will go right back to where it was previously in many situations.
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