A few people I've corresponded with, including one stock pumper who called me the other day with a "hot tip", ought to read this.
Carefully.
See, that caller was talking about a tiny little biotech that had come up with what amounted to a combination therapy combining a statin with ordinary (and unpatentable) compounds. He was convinced the world would be changed (and I'd get rich if I listened to him.)
My response to him was that it was far more likely that ultimately statins would be banned as damned dangerous, or at least wind up with a black-label warning.
Well, we didn't get the second here, but this isn't good news for the statin makers, or those who have been taking them.
The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday raised safety concerns about the popular class of cholesterol-fighting drugs called statins, warning that patients taking the drugs may face a "small increased risk" of higher blood sugar levels and of being diagnosed with diabetes.
The federal safety agency said Tuesday it plans to add the diabetes-risk language to the "warnings and precautions" sections of labeling for the statin drugs. The drugs that will get the warning include top-selling brand names such as Lipitor, Lescol, Pravachol, Crestor, Mevacor, Altoprev, Livalo and Zocor. Under these and a range of generic names, the drugs have been taken for years by tens of millions of people to prevent heart attack, stroke and cardiovascular disease.
Yeah, right. What statins do is lower cholesterol. That much is pretty-well accepted as scientific fact. But the link between cholesterol and heart disease, stroke and similar is not particularly well-established. Correlation is not causation folks, and there are more and more cardiologists and others who are becoming convinced that the problem is inflammation, not cholesterol.
See, cholesterol is essential to life. If you were to get rid of it in your body you'd die -- with certainty, as it is necessary to establish cell membranes in mammals, not to mention being required for bile acids (without which you cannot digest food!), sex hormones (testosterone, progesterone and estrogen) along with being an essential part of the myelin -- the neural sheath essential for nerve conduction.
It is also manufactured in the liver by the body.
There's a whole host of folks who want to argue that cholesterol causes strokes, heart attacks and cardiovascular disease, because abnormal amounts of it are often found plugging things up. The argument thus goes that decreasing the amount of cholesterol in the body is "good."
It's amazing how the presence of a given thing turns into causation without proof, when in fact what you may well have is cholesterol becoming adhered to damaged tissue instead. And if that's the case then lowering cholesterol, without doing anything else, is treating symptoms rather than causes and what's worse is that a lower cholesterol level or the drug itself might do harm to other parts of the body -- like, it appears, possibly the insulin response mechanism.
This wouldn't be the first time that making money selling exotic and expensive drugs was more important than health, you know.
In any event the facts are not in on this subject by any means. What we are learning, however, is that the drugs intended to change cholesterol balance and prevalence in the body are dangerous, exactly as I expected. Whether that risk is worth the potential reward, especially if we're barking up the wrong tree, is an entirely different caliber of question than what is typically presented to patients.
In any event if you're taking these drugs you now have something new to worry about.
Damage to the body's insulin response is serious stuff and not to be ignored or poo-pooed away.
This much I'll tell you with certainly: That crap isn't going down my pie-hole under any set of circumstances.
