Latest study shouldn’t ‘ease your mind’ about these drugs

By comparison, these cholesterol meds make statins look warm and fuzzy!

I’m talking about Repatha and Praluent, the PCSK9 blockers that hit the market just a little over two years ago. These drugs put up a roadblock to a gene that regulates how much of it your liver produces — and, in the process, they can drop your cholesterol to dangerously low levels.

So far, they’ve been selling like week-old hotcakes — but drugmakers have a plan up their sleeves to fix that.

With the help of the FDA and those media outlets that are more than happy to parrot what Big Pharma says, soon you’ll be hearing some glowing “news” about these drugs.

But as we’ve been warning you from the get-go, lowering your cholesterol to such unheard-of numbers can be a prescription for disaster.

Label lingo
You know that when a drugmaker spends a billion dollars on a single study, it must be planning on getting that money back somehow.

Well, that’s what Amgen forked over to fund what it dubbed “FOURIER,” a study to collect data about its PCSK9 shot, Repatha.

And the prize that Amgen is hoping for is the FDA’s permission to add a handful of words to the Repatha label, saying that this pricey drug can lower your risk of having a heart attack.

That’s worth a king’s ransom to help further push doctors to start prescribing it!

But one hiccup that Amgen has experienced along the way started even before Repatha and Praluent were approved by the FDA: At the time, dementia was a big enough concern for the agency to send the drug companies a letter warning that it’s aware of “neurocognitive adverse events” from meds in the PCSK9 drug class.

In other words, might they trigger dementia?

The last thing Amgem needs is to give docs another reason not to prescribe its cash cow cholesterol med, so the drugmaker yanked around 2,000 participants (out of a pool of over 27,000 who took either Repatha or a placebo in the FOURIER study) to see what effect this drug had on their brains.

In talking about the findings, most of these pharma-funded doctors have tried to stuff any connection between dementia and Repatha back in the closet by reassuring us that this study, supposedly the first to follow PCSK9 takers “over time,” found that worry to have no credibility.

But at least one of them is breaking ranks and warning: Not so fast.

One of the investigators in the FOURIER trial, Dr. Axel Sigurdsson, has pointed out that the patients were followed for less than two years — a time frame that cannot answer the question of how these drugs might affect your brain.

What might happen beyond that limited look-see “is unknown,” he said.

But we do know certain basic facts about cholesterol — ones that just can’t be changed or ignored:

Cholesterol fact #1: For decades now, we’ve known that if your cholesterol falls under 180, you’re at twice the risk of a stroke of those who are in the range of 230.

Cholesterol fact #2: A study published in the American Journal of Medicine discovered that if you’re in your 70s and have cholesterol numbers below 160, you’re twice as likely to die as someone whose numbers are as high as 199.

Cholesterol fact #3: Cholesterol is vital to keeping your brain functioning properly! A study done almost a decade ago from researchers at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine found that “high cholesterol is associated with better memory function” in seniors!

And by driving down your cholesterol numbers to double-digit lows, your brain may be the first to feel the effects.

Hopefully, insurance companies will keep rejecting claims for these PCSK9 meds because of their huge price tag of around $14K a year. But, as I’ve said before, that price is what’s causing insurers to balk about paying for it — and probably the best thing that can be said about these drugs!

“Powerful new cholesterol med won’t harm memory, easing concerns” Amy Norton, August 16, 2017, HealthDay, consumer.healthday.com