The controversy raging over the safety and effectiveness of statins is creating uncertainty among people taking them or who might need to consider doing so. Are statins as controversial as stories suggest?
Statins lower the amount of bad (low-density lipoprotein) cholesterol in your blood, and the higher your cholesterol, the greater the riskof a heart attack. If you have a gene defect that causes a very high cholesterol level – a condition called familial hypercholesterolaemia (FH) – then you are at very high risk of a heart attack. Before statins, doctors were virtually powerless to prevent such heart attacks because there were no drugs that were effective at reducing cholesterol without causing intolerable side effects. Statins changed all that.
Now people with FH can take a statin and expect to live a normal lifespan. Similarly, if you have suffered a heart attack, regardless of your cholesterol level, there is abundant uncontested evidence that taking a statin will reduce your risk of a further heart attack or stroke. So where is the problem?
The problem arises when we consider giving a statin to healthy people, who have no apparent cholesterol gene defect or evidence of heart disease, in the hope it will prevent a future heart attack. This is when doctors start to worry about the risk-to-benefit ratio. If a doctor is going to prescribe a statin for a healthy individual to protect against future heart disease, he or she wants to be pretty certain the drug won’t do more harm than good because, unfortunately, all drugs have side effects.
No comments:
Post a Comment