Darwin or Design? Explore the Evidence for Yourself

Te Evils of Statin Drugs

Al Sears, MD

11903 Southern Blvd., Ste. 208

Royal Palm Beach, FL 33411

December 4, 2008

Dear Mark,

Statin drugs—cholesterol-lowering blockbusters like Lipitor®, Zocor®, and Crestor®—can make you weak as a kitten. This is one of their most underreported and dangerous side effects.

The condition I’m talking about’s called rhabdomyolysis. It’s when your muscle cells burst and disintegrate. Drug and alcohol abuse, traumatic injury, electrical shock, and ruptured blood vessels are all major causes.

Unfortunately, so are statin drugs. In fact one of them, Cerivastatin (Baycor), was pulled from the market in 2001 after numerous reports of rhabdomyolysis.

The latest research indicates that statin users suffering from fatigue, muscle cramping, and weakness—a problem almost ten percent of statin users report (and I’ll bet the actual number’s higher)—may be in for something a lot worse.

Researchers out of the University of Alabama zeroed in on statins’ effect on a class of muscle cells called “SC’s,” or satellite cells.1 These are responsible for cell division and growth. If you strain a muscle, they kick into gear, repairing and replacing damaged tissue.

The study focused on Zocor®, one of the most popular statin drugs, and found that it slowed down the restorative action of SC’s by fifty percent. This is especially dangerous for your skeletal muscles, since SC’s are active guardians and healers when it comes to ligaments and tendons.

The fact is you shouldn’t be focusing on cholesterol levels anyway. It’s the great red herring of modern medicine. Seventy-five percent of heart attack sufferers have perfectly normal cholesterol levels.

The real culprit is inflammation. We’ve known for years that inflammation of the tissue that lines your arteries (the “endothelium”) is the main cause of atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries. Endothelial damage leads to the build-up of arterial plaque—a substance made up of bad stuff that gets trapped in damaged tissue, including triglycerides, waste from cellular metabolism, and calcium.

As plaque builds up over time, it blocks the flow of vital nutrients and oxygen to the rest of your body, including your heart. Starve your heart of oxygen and pretty soon you’ll have a heart attack.

Plaque build-up around damaged arterial tissue can also cause small ruptures that lead to blood clots. These clots can eventually starve the heart of oxygen by blocking blood flow. And if they break free, they can do damage elsewhere, interfering with your heart’s pumping action—or going to your brain and causing a stroke.

And the science proves it. A recent “meta-study” came along and took a wrecking ball to the cholesterol myth. Published in the internationally prestigious Quarterly Journal of Medicine, it extensively surveyed results from decades of research on heart disease involving hundreds of thousands of individuals.

The conclusion? Absolutely no correlation exists between cholesterol and heart attack risk.2

Bottom line: steer clear of statins. Worry about inflammation instead. Here are the best ways to keep it in check:

Watch your C-reactive protein levels. (CRP) is a good indicator of inflammation and an excellent predictor of heart disease. A simple blood test can measure your levels. The good news is that if you have elevated levels there are simple things you can do to lower them.

Get your supplements. I also recommend some heart-saving supplements to my patients such as L-arginine, folic acid, and antioxidants such vitamin E and vitamin C.

Five hundered milligrams of L-arginine daily will help improve blood flow and dilate blood vessels in the lining of the heart, and support heart and muscle growth. You can also get L-arginine in food sources such as red meat, fish, chicken, beans, nuts and chocolate.

Get your antioxidants. With free radical damage as a major cause of inflammation, you need to prevent it by boosting your immune strength and fighting off free radicals with a daily dose of antioxidants.

Here are six powerhouses that I recommend to my patients (amounts are daily).

• Vitamin C – 3,000 mg (in divided doses)
• Carotenoids – 2,500 IUs
• Vitamin E – 400 mg of mixed tocopherols and tocotrienols
• CoQ10 – 200 mg, or 50 mg of reduced CoQ10 (Accel)
• Alpha lipoic acid (ALA) – 100 mg
• Lutein – 20 mg
• Lycopene – 20 mg

Keep your homocysteine levels in check. A simple blood test will give you an accurate reading, although your doctor probably won’t run it unless you ask. A level above 10.4 umol/L is abnormally high. I generally shoot for a goal of below 7 with my patients.

Lowering your homocysteine is also a simple matter of getting the right supplements.

Here’s what I give my patients (amounts are daily):

• Vitamin B12 – 500 mcg
• Folic Acid – 800 mcg
• Vitamin B6 – 25 mg
• Riboflavin (B2) – 25 mg
• TMG (trimethylglyceine) – 500 mg

To Your Good Health,

Al Sears, MD

1.Thalacker-Mercer et al. “Simvastatin Reduces Human Primary Satellite Cell Proliferation in Culture.” University of Alabama at Birmingham. For presentation at the American Physiological Society Conference The Integrative Biology of Exercise V. Hilton Head, SC. September 24-27, 2008.

2.Ravnskov, U. “High cholesterol may protect against infections and atherosclerosis.” Quarterly Journal of Medicine. 2003. 96:927-34.