Statins, Sugar and Fish Oil, Oh My!
Times, they are a changin’. Here is another article showing that statins may not be worth using in primary prevention for heart disease. Of course, this is heresy to my cardiology brethren who feel that your LDL should be at zero. They haven’t even come to grips with the fact that fat (excluding trans fat) is not really evil. In fact, low fat diets are problematic. Throw that patient on a statin and it could be even worse. Make them go on a high carb diet and you have catastrophic results. What is nice about this article is it shows that what you eat effects how you think. Only fish oil saved these rats.
We need to start changing our recommendations on what people should eat and what medicines they should take (fish oil vs. statins). Unfortunately, we won’t. What we will do, though, is pay doctors on quality indicators which force them to use statins and recommend low fat diet and high carb (grain) diets. It’s truly embarrassing.
I am absolutely convinced, based on personal experience, that low to no carbs is the way to go. I have no scientific evidence, only what happens to me when I avoid carbs: weight loss, decreased cholesterol/LDL.
So what happens if you, a non-hospital PCP, review this info with ur patient, and the patient declines lipitor or crestor ? even if the “standards” recommend statins, u can’t force the patient to take them. so expain ur concerns and the contraindications in a way that the patient gets to choose ! I expect many will decline the rx and avoid the expense and trips to the pharmacy.
That is what should happen unless you distort the system by paying doctors on the results of their patients’ cholesterol levels. That is called pay-for-performance or quality indicators and something I have been fighting against for over a decade.
Please note that “quality measures” applied by hospitals in this country require that stroke and CAD patients receive statins upon discharge unless there is a contradiction. No, being over 90 is NOT a contraindication. A doctor who fails to prescribe one for a demented, debilitated, malnourished patient with a cholesterol level of 120 is considered to have fallen below expected standards. I am not making this up,
Stella, your point is well taken. This is another example showing that, with the exception of Direct Care/cash-only doctors, every single one of us whose income is from any third party insurance is corrupted. None of us has clean hands now, when we have to succumb to external mandates in order to pay the mortgage.
Is that suicide due to abstaining from good tasting food? Sounds justifiable.
Allow me to hammer more nails into the coffin of the lipid/CVD connection.
Total cholesterol less than 170 has been associated with an increase in incidence of suicide. Statins block the synthesis of CoQ10, an essential nutrient that transfers fatty acids into the cells for energy, especially in cells that have high energy requirements, like, say, myocardial cells. Cholesterol is an anti-oxidant. Cardiovascular disease is a disease of oxidant stress. Take a look at the book, “The Cholesterol Myths”, written by a physician/statitician,