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Senior Citizens Should Heed Side Effects of Statin
Drugs, Says Author
Former scientist astronaut, doctor says war on
cholesterol is misguided
 Dec.
21, 2005 – Dr. Duane Graveline is a former scientist astronaut, retired
family doctor and a senior citizen who has focused his attention in
recent years on statin drugs. As a results of his search of the medical and
scientific literature for an explanation for his own statin associated
transient global amnesia, Dr. Graveline has written a new book, "Statin Drugs
Side Effects and the Misguided War on Cholesterol." He reveals the
critical importance of cholesterol for proper brain function and memory
and the reasons for the damage statin drugs do to muscles, nerves and
heart and even personalities. Below is an article he has contributed to
SeniorJournal.com.
By Duane Graveline MD MPH
After nearly five years of responding to people’s
telephone and email queries about statin drugs use, I have learned that
very few people know of the full range of side effects of the statin
class of drugs. This is especially true of our senior citizens. Even
many prescribing physicians are ignorant of the broad reach of the
statin class of drugs.
I suppose my first rude awakening of the prevalence
of this lack of knowledge among physicians about the drugs they
prescribe was during my own personal experience four years ago with
transient global amnesia bouts after taking Lipitor.
On both occasions they said, “Lipitor doesn’t do
that.” Dozens of pharmacists during that same time period said the same
thing, “Statins don’t do that.”
Now that our statin study has reported greater
than five hundred cases of statin associated transient global amnesia,
physicians are reluctantly accepting the reality of amnesia, confusion,
disorientation, extreme forgetfulness and aggravation of pre-existing
senility but many still do not know it exists.
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This book is an update
of an earlier book and is only available at Dr. Graveline's
Website.
Click to Home Page
To learn more about the
earlier book or buy at Amazon, click link
below.
Statin Side Effects |
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You can imagine my concern when an FAA flight
surgeon told me they had been allowing statin drug use in commercial
airline pilots for several years because they “did not know statins
could do that”.
The medical literature is now replete with reports
of statin associated amnesias and other evidence of mental dysfunction
and still many of our prescribing physicians remain unaware of statin’s
special cognitive impairment tendency. Their patient’s rapid descent
into dementia after a statin is started is much too often written off by
their doctor as senile brain changes or beginning Alzheimers when the
real culprit is their statin drug.
Readers will be interested to know of Muldoon’s two
reports in the medical literature documenting cognitive impairment in
100% of statin users if sufficiently sensitive testing is done. If this
statin associated cognitive decline is true for the younger statin
users, think of how much more likely it may be in our elderly.
These findings represent only the cholesterol
inhibition effect of the statin class of drugs. What about the
inevitable collateral damage to ubiquinones and dolichols from statin
drug use?
Any drug that inhibits the production of
cholesterol via the mevalonate pathway, as all statins do, must also
inhibit ubiquinones and dolichols. You cannot have one without the
other.
Those from ubiquinone (a.k.a. Co-enzyme Q10)
inhibition give rise to liver inflammation, myopathy and its more
serious form, rhabdomyopathy, with muscle ache, pain, sensitivity and
soreness anywhere in the body. Hundreds of patients have received
expensive and worrisome cardiac workups when the muscles involved are in
the chest.
Another complex of symptoms results from neuropathy
with ringing in the ears, weakness of extremities, numbness, decreased
ability to feel heat or cold and altered sensation anywhere in the body
– numbness and tingling of the feet being a common early sign. Such
symptoms are common in our elderly and their special association with
statin drug use is easily missed.
Lack of sufficient CoQ10 dependant energy reserves
results in tiredness, shortness of breath and easy fatigability and
congestive heart failure with ankle edema, nocturia, shortness of breath
with recumbency and the need for extra pillows for sleep. Seniors are
especially prone to have such symptoms and be unaware of a possible
relationship to their statin drug.
These are only some of the more common side effects
of CoQ10 lack. Physicians for the most part are well aware of hepatitis,
myopathy and rhabdomyolysis but many still steadfastly refuse to admit
neuropathy despite the convincing published works of Gaist of Norway and
cardiologists and internists still deny the reality of congestive heart
failure despite the widely published and equally convincing research of
the Doctors Langsjoen of Texas. Such physician denial is particularly
difficult for our elderly to understand.
The symptoms we associate with statin induced
dolicol inhibition are a broad range of affective disorders, reflecting
alteration of neuropeptides, known as brain cell messengers. Very few
physicians and almost no patients are aware of the many case reports of
statin associated hostility, aggression, road-rage type behavior,
accident proneness and depression of varying degrees with its inevitable
suicidal ideation, attempts and occasional successes. The relationship
of such symptoms with statin drug use is all too frequently missed and
written off as “mental”.
So when a physician asks the elderly if they are
having any problems with their statins, he must be specific, for a
patient is very unlikely to report such symptoms as tiredness, hostility
and depression when their “cholesterol is doing so well”. As to their
memory impairment, they are likely to “forget about it”. Something to
think about, isn’t it?
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Visit Website |
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Dr. Graveline's website
has much more information about statins and their effects.
The opening page features
his book but by scrolling down the page readers can find many
links to useful information.
You can also purchase book
on his site.
Click to Home Page |
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Statins and the Elderly
Cholesterol has long been known to be only a very
weak cardiovascular risk factor for the elderly.
Only in those elderly people with previous stroke
or heart attack does the use of statin show clear benefit and it is
evident regardless of cholesterol response during statin use.
Even in cases where cholesterol remains the same or
increases during statin treatment, reduction of cardiovascular risk is
evident. This is not so for the elderly without history of heart disease
or diabetes.
This lack of significant cardiovascular benefit
from the use of statins for cholesterol reduction in the elderly of
minimal to moderate risk, has been corroborated in many studies.
Our first clue to this enigma was brought out in
the year 2000 by Uffe Ravnskov, author of The Cholesterol Myths. In this
book Ravnskov revealed his growing suspicion that statin drugs appear to
work to lower cardiovascular risk by an effect independent of
cholesterol.
His findings have led directly to our current
awareness that statins work by a previously unsuspected
anti-inflammatory effect helping to explain why their use is so much
more effective in high-risk persons than those with simple cholesterol
elevation.
Despite this, Pfizer has seen fit to continue
active promotion of their product, Lipitor, to the “healthy elderly with
simple cholesterol elevation. Pfizer’s overall marketing campaign
obfuscates and, indeed, fails to disclose the fact that while Lipitor
lowers cholesterol there is no evidence that this reduction has any
effect on the development of coronary heart disease or lowered mortality
rates for elderly patients”.
One of the many randomized control trials of the
benefits of statins for the primary prevention of heart disease in
patients over the age of 70, the Prosper Study, deserves special mention
concerning side effects of statin drugs. This study found no benefit
from the use of statins in elderly patients as to their risk of having a
new heart attack but reported an ominous and statistically significant
25% increase in cancer diagnoses among those using a statin.
Interestingly enough this relates to the special
anti-inflammatory effect of statin drugs - the same effect that
decreases cardiovascular risk. The mechanism of action whereby statins
achieve this risk reduction comes from their newly recognized ability to
inhibit nuclear factor kappa B (NF-kB). This vital transcription factor
is the basis of our entire immuno-defense system.
To inhibit NF-kB may be good for our arteries but
what of our ability to defend ourselves from bacteria, viruses and
malignancies. The Prosper study was not the first to demonstrate this
dark side of our statins. The Japan lipid intervention study group also
reported unusual numbers of malignancies in their 45,000 patients on
relatively low doses of Zocor.
In addition, Pfizer’s promotion of Lipitor has thus
created an artificial demand for Lipitor, which would not exist if full
and fair disclosure had been made concerning benefit lack in the elderly
population.
Pfizer’s Lipitor promotion and advertising campaign
has resulted in billions of dollars of unnecessary drug expenditures at
a time when the rising costs of health care is creating a crisis and
drug costs to our elderly are the most rapidly increasing component of
the Health Care System.
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