What You Don’t Know About This Drug Could Hurt You
Cardiovascular disease such as heart attacks and strokes is the leading cause of death among men worldwide. And as such, pharmaceutical companies are vying for your attention and your money with their
What You Don’t Know About This Drug Could Hurt You
Cardiovascular disease such as heart attacks and strokes is the leading cause of death among men worldwide. And as such, pharmaceutical companies are vying for your attention and your money with their drugs that are supposed to prevent or cure cardiovascular disease. The most popular of those drugs is a class called statins. They are so popular, in fact, that the most filled prescription in the United States is for statin drugs. That spells big profit for drug manufacturers. In fact, in 2010 pharmaceutical company - just one of the many manufacturers of statin drugs - announced that it profited $12 billion in that one year from a single statin drug!
You’re a man, and the older you get, the greater your statistical risk of cardiovascular disease grows. That means that your doctors are trained to start pushing statins on you, and with each passing year, the pressure grows. But what’s the deal? Are statins a panacea or do they contain hidden dangers? And, in fact, do they even address the underlying causes of cardiovascular disease?
The Story of Statins
Although the government was still pushing the discredited idea that dietary cholesterol caused cardiovascular disease, in 1971 scientists knew better. They knew that dietary cholesterol had practically no influence on blood cholesterol levels. Still, it was noticed that high blood cholesterol levels in humans were associated with (but not necessarily causative of) cardiovascular disease. So pharmaceutical companies were researching ways to prevent natural cholesterol synthesis in the human body.
One such company was Sankyo, a Japanese pharmaceutical company. A research scientist working for Sankyo discovered a substance produced by some bacteria that inhibits a key enzyme involved in the production of cholesterol. He and his team were able to isolate the substance, called mevastatin. Although the substance did prevent the synthesis of cholesterol, it also produced some unpleasant side effects such as muscle loss, tumors, and a minor symptom called death. But this discovery paved the way for the development of other statin drugs by other pharmaceutical companies that are now manufactured and pushed on the public.
Here’s the trouble: that cholesterol in the blood causes 