Posted on 07/03/2007 3:00:09 PM PDT by Dysart
As he examined data on a computer one day last fall, drug-safety reviewer Ralph Edwards saw something that concerned him: Of 172 people in his database who developed Lou Gehrig's disease or something similar while taking prescription medicines, 40 had been on statins, the huge-selling cholesterol drugs.
Dr. Edwards, director of the World Health Organization's drug-monitoring center, has amassed about four million reports of medical problems experienced by people taking prescription drugs. His job is to sift through these so-called adverse events, looking for "signals" of potential side effects.
The number of Lou Gehrig's cases associated with statins struck Dr. ...
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
What about the common side effect of peripheral neuropathy?
There is too much money involved in these products to blindly trust anyone.
Whether one chooses to use Intelligent Design or Evolution, the point is those metabolic pathways that are casually being switched off exist for many reasons essential to all animal life. Trashing aminotransferase levels and switching off cholesterol synthesis is a pretty radical substitute for a sane diet and exrcise. Yes, many people have a gentic predisposition for high serum cholesterol. My sister is a health nut/gym rat and basically eats lettuce(!) and has elevated cholesterols. Is she gonna die? Maybe in the next Marathon? I doubt it.
"200 mg/dL"..Stock soars. "Ooops..we meant 160mg/dL!!" Stock declares dividends, splits, soars.
I should demonstrate my credentials at this point
Clinical Neurologist with ~21 years experience
Board certified in both Neurology and Electrodiagnostic Medicine.
I distrust the statins, from the standpoint of their effect on muscles and peripheral nerves, but I see no scientific basis in their involvement directly in the Upper Motor Neuron involvement in ALS. The science is wrong...
“Nothing in life can be completely safe (even staying in bed can cause bed sores)”
Yes, but these meds are not solving the problem they were intended to solve. The studies show that the real reason why there are statistically fewer heart attacks by people on statins is because of their ability to thin the blood.
There’s lots of safer ways to do that than taking a statin with tons of nasty side effects.
You might want to read some actual studies about the usefulness of taking statins to prevent heart attacks. You are putting your trust in something that isn’t very effective.
Definition of General paresis
General paresis: Progressive dementia and generalized paralysis due to chronic inflammation of the covering and substance of the brain (meningoencephalitis). General paresis is a part of late (tertiary) syphilis, occurring a decade or more after the initial infection
My daughter is the same way, an former elite, an American record holder, who didn’t eat red meat, but she had high cholesterol.
I think that it is a matter of semantics. They have something that mimics the symptoms of ALS, that they are calling sporadic ALS. What the Mayo Clinic article is saying is that the symptoms might be very similar but causes of the two are different. Who knows?
Book Mark
What is your perspective on the peripheral neuropathy? I took Lovastatin so long that I had forgotten ever reading the cautions, so when my hands and arms weakened and my feet burned I was stumped, and my doctor (Endocrinology) was scratching his head for a short while. (I respected him-He remembered the infernal metabolic pathways chart!) After discontinuing the statin the symptoms faded in a few weeks.
There are some structures that need a lot of cholesterol and triglicerides. Could aggressive reduction of them could produce Demyelination? If so, it could explain the symptoms.
The onset was slow, and insidious.
My "Why fix it" comments are based on a three-generation record of zero cardiovascular deaths, despite familial hypercholestemia and hyperlipemia.
I have a very similar familial history which complicates my decision matrix. Almost all of my known relatives lived into their late 80's and 90's and none of them died of cardio-related problems. I know that my father and likely his father had elevated lipids. Go figure.
With this caution concerning ALS I would be even more reluctent to take them. I already have Dystonia of facial/eye muscles. I sure don't need anything to make that worse. BOTOX does a pretty good job of control. Yes, BOTOX is really used to actually "help" people , not just cosmetic.
one reference,
http://www.springerlink.com/content/7871uvlbme4ytygf/
Within the past 3 years seven cases of reversible peripheral neuropathy apparently caused by statins have been reported. Here we report seven additional cases associated with long-term statin therapy, in which other causes of neuropathy were thoroughly excluded. The neuropathy was in all cases axonal and with affection of both thick and thin nerve fibers. The symptoms of neuropathy persisted during an observation period lasting from 10 weeks to 1 year in four cases after statin treatment had been withdrawn. We suggest that long-term statin treatment may be associated with chronic peripheral neuropathy.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15460180&dopt=Citation
Various pharmacologic agents are available for the treatment of hypercholesterolemia, including 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl coenzyme A (HMG-CoA) reductase inhibitors, commonly referred to as statins, which offer favorable lipid-lowering effects and reductions in morbidity and mortality. Statins are usually better tolerated than other lipid-lowering agents and therefore have become a mainstay of treatment for hypercholesterolemia. However, recent case reports of peripheral neuropathy in patients treated with statins may have gone unnoticed by health care professionals. To evaluate the possible link between statins and peripheral neuropathy, literature searches using MEDLINE (January 1993—November 2003) and International Pharmaceutical Abstracts (January 1970—June 2002) were performed. Key search terms were statin, neuropathy, and HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors. Based on epidemiologic studies as well as case reports, a risk of peripheral neuropathy associated with statin use may exist; however, the risk appears to be minimal. On the other hand, the benefits of statins are firmly established. These findings should alert prescribers to a potential risk of peripheral neuropathy in patients receiving any of the statins; that is, statins should be considered the cause of peripheral neuropathy when other etiologies have been excluded.
Other references are available
I have observed a correlation between Statin use and unexplained peripheral neuropathy in my clinical practice. Obviously, my statistical base is weak, but the correlation is sufficiently strong to at least consider a causal relationship.
“Yes, but these meds are not solving the problem they were intended to solve.”
There has yet to be a definitive study that demonstrates that lowering cholesterol actually prevents heart disease or heart attacks.
That is why none of these medications are allowed to be labeled as “reduce the risk of heart disease”.
There is simply no proof that the statins work to actually reduce deaths from heart disease.
Easy, there is something wrong with a drug and oh, my god, the drug helping increase the lives of many is, guess what, suspected of causing some side effect; andddd the wieners in my generation weren’t told that it was not perfect and they may not live forever now they are getting into their 60s and it has to be someone’s fault, not theirs , because they wanted to live forever like their momies said they would and they have taken a drug, that may have a side effect, and oh, my god, they may not live forever, and it wasn’t even their fault, it was the drug, or the drug company, or the government, or someone but not them.
Articles like these are soooo ridiculous!
Get the picture. I know my generation well and have watched them with their greedy, self centered, self absorbed, game playing lives and everyone of them (at least 99.999%) is to stupid to come up with a medication on their own or even realize that everything has a probability of being harmful or fatal or whatever.
So now they will probably want these drugs band because they are stupid.
I’m pretty well convinced that this planet and particularly this country would have been better off if the parents of the children in my generation would have put them in a bag when they were young and dropped them off a bridge. I was to valuable when I was young; I was digging coal and helping out my parents and being thankful that I didn’t get sick because when you went to the hospital, you usually didn’t come home. And they are worried about the side effect of a drug that my parents never had the chance to have and which would have probably saved their life -— Sheee, cut me a break!
Thank you for the references. Yes, your individual statistical base may be weak, but I suspect there are thousands of individual "weak" statistical bases, that, should they ever be compiled, would be damning.
Actuarily, statins do prevent cardivacular events, but the patients do not live a day longer as a class. They seem to die of something else, instead.
There are also Quality of Life issues, such as short-term memory impairment, observed by other posters here, as well as by myself that implies some causality. We just have real life observations of no statistical import. Yet.
I worked in Research for forty years, and have a lot of peer reviewed publications-I know the rules. There is no motive or funding available to compile and integrate these observations or spotty statistics at present. No one is going to fund studies that would upset a multibillion Dollar applecart.
Despite everyone's distaste and disgust at the thought, there will not be until the Tort lawyers get involved, a long time down the road when the liver cancer (for example) epidemics cut in. I do not like the looks of those molecular structures.
Add to that the growing practice of Medicine by MBA administrators who demand physicians double-book patients and prsssure them to get throughput rates similar to a Mcdonald's, and we have an overprescribing industry. This is why I personally know four physicians who have walked away from their practices.
I believe that you will find a link to Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine or Lawyers for Responsible Mediciane in most of the studies that claim a link between statins and ALS. They are both employed by PETA.
Whether the doctors or researchers actually believe what they are saying is questionable.
There was recently a doctor from Cornell who published a book on the deleterious factors involved with drinking milk. He heads the Physician’s for Responsible Medicine, a fact that was conveniently left off the reviews of the book.
Whenever you read about a questionable study that has to do with food, think PETA. They were behind the swordfish scare, the tuna scare, the ATKINS DIET attacks and probably a lot more that I can’t think of.
Thanks for the tip, heads up
I was talking to someone else on this thread about our athletic daughters (mine was an American record holder) who were on low fat, high carb diets and still had high cholesterol. Later I started thinking that the high carbs were probably interfering with the burning of fat, just like Dr. Atkins claimed. It was PETA that killed the Atkins diet. (Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine). PETA opposes the use of statins because they are used to lower the cholesterol from eating meat. According to PETA, a vegetarian diet will do the same thing, more naturally.
The extra carbs, not utilized, are back converted in the liver to Fat, hence the Fatty Liver in Diabetics and Alcoholics
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.