Statins awful side effects
HEALTH
DRUG BUST Alan Cassels
M
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y office phone rings and a man on the line asks, “Are you the guy who writes about pharmaceutical stuff? Didn’t I just hear you on CBC?” “Yup, that’s probably me,” I say. And like an old sailor at the start of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, who latches on to a guest at the door to a wedding feast, he doesn’t pause as he launches in to his story: “My doctor told me I’ve got high cholesterol and put me on Lipitor right away…” “And then what happened?” I ask. “I got these muscle pains all over the place. My legs, my arms. It was awful. I felt weak, could barely walk, felt like crap…” “Then what?” “Well then I went back to my doctor and asked him if feeling all weak like this is because of the drug.” “And he said he’d never heard anything like that, before, right?” I ask. “How did you know?” he yelps. “How did you know?” “Now tell me how your story ends,” I
say. “Did your doctor change your dose, switch you to another cholesterol lowering drug like Crestor or Zocor or just tell you to live with it?” “My gosh, for me he did all three. First, he put me on a different dose and then I still felt like crap so he switched me to that other one. When the muscle pain didn’t go away, I begged to stop taking it, but he refused to believe it could be the drug.” He pauses to catch his breath. “I’m amazed you knew,” he adds. “How could you know what happened?” Ever hear a story so many times it starts to feel like the truth? This story has been repeated to me – with only a few variations – so often I feel like I know the plot and scenes by heart, and I’m no longer surprised by the main actor’s fatal flaws. If you are one of the three million Canadians swallowing a cholesterol lowering, or “statin” drug (a drug like Lipitor, Zocor or Crestor) every day, you may be familiar with the storyline too. And if your family members haven’t yet been targeted for chemical alteration of their
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cholesterol, stay tuned for a compelling and instructive tale. But what does this parable mean? What can we say about a poor patient who takes a drug, a treatment, which hangs like an albatross around his neck? First of all, literary allusions aside, while you wouldn’t take a drug because some old sea dog told you “it worked great for me,” you also shouldn’t refuse to take a drug because he said it made him feel like hell. Let’s explore the world of statin side effect denial a bit deeper, shall we? While many people won’t have any problem taking statins, others will experience terrible, sometimes intolerable, adverse effects. And, naturally, they will want to stop taking them. In fact, the most common thing about statins is that if you’re an average person, you won’t take them for long. The Heart Protection Study, one of the largest cholesterol-lowering drug trials ever conducted, showed that more than a third of the patients who took a statin for only six weeks quit the trial. Why? The published research holds no answers, but I suspect it’s because the patients couldn’t tolerate the drug. In the real world, the statin drop-out rate is huge; one study found that a third of patients quit their statin within a year and within two years twothirds of patients will quit. Basically, if you tell your doctor that it’s “normal” to quit taking your cholesterol-lowering drug, there’s a big body of research to back you up. The muscle weakening that people keep phoning me about is probably the most well known of all the adverse effects of the statins. Back in 2005, even Health Canada recognized this problem and sent out an advisory telling all statin manufacturers to update their safety information about the risks of rhabdomyolysis (the medical term for the muscle weakening thing). Other unpleasant side effects your doctor may not have heard about include sleep disturbances, sexual dysfunction, depression, confusion, short-term or “working” memory loss and transient global amnesia. Is it possible that people experience adverse effects related to statins far more commonly than our doctors currently think? I think it’s highly plausible, especially given the troubling fact that the medical journals don’t publish balanced information covering the statins’ adverse events. This is a jaw-dropping bit of trivia, but of the 14 major statin trials to date, only two have ever reported the full data set on the serious adverse
