Villain Vanquished

Villain Vanquished

In a jerky black and white film clip, with frantic piano music playing, a dastardly villain ties your heart to the railroad tracks.

Can you guess who the villain is? Sure, that’s easy. He was called in from Central Casting years ago and his evil reputation has been carefully groomed and promoted by mainstream medicine ever since. It’s the BAD cholesterol: That nasty LDL.

In a surprising new review of cholesterol studies, however, it turns out that LDL is not quite the Snidely Whiplash it’s been made out to be.

Lower! Lower! Lower!

You may remember back in 2004 when an “expert panel” for the National Cholesterol Education Program (NCEP) recommended acceptable LDL levels so ridiculously low that only high doses of cholesterol-lowering statin drugs (or even high doses of SEVERAL different drugs used at once) was the only way to reach these “acceptable” levels.

This recommendation was widely received as the new standard. And why not? For years, the medical mainstream has hammered in the go-lower mindset regarding LDL levels. There was just one little cow in the ointment, but it hardly mattered. In the e-Alert “Day Old Fish” (7/29/04), I told you about a potentially embarrassing report that emerged after the NCEP guidelines were released. Turns out, seven of the nine NCEP panelists had financial connections to Pfizer (the maker of the world’s best selling drug, Lipitor, a statin), and five panelists had served as consultants to Pfizer. Seven of the panelists also had financial connections to Merck (the maker of Zocor, a statin).

Did this put a dent in the report’s credibility? Not a bit. (Not among the mainstream crowd anyway.) I’ve seen the NCEP report referenced many times over the past two years, and it’s always mentioned in respectful terms.

To be honest, I don’t expect that will change one bit, in spite of a new review of cholesterol studies from the Department of Veterans Affairs and the University of Michigan School of Medicine. Researchers examined all the significant studies that have tested the link between LDL levels and major cardiovascular outcomes in patients with LDL levels less than 130 mg/dL.

Writing in the Annals of Internal Medicine last month, the team noted that although evidence supports the use of statins for high-risk patients, “current clinical evidence does not demonstrate that titrating lipid therapy to achieve proposed low LDL cholesterol levels is beneficial or safe.”

Translation: It’s time to stop the statin madness.

Safety in numbers

Why is it unsafe to lay statin therapy on as thick as it will go? There are plenty of reasons. Well known statin side effects include liver damage, nerve damage, and sexual dysfunction. But the side effect that I find most telling about this “heart health” drug is this one: Statin use depletes specific antioxidants that the heart requires for optimal health.

In the e-Alert “Learn the Hidden Side Effects of Cholesterol Lowering Drugs” (3/5/02), I told you about a study conducted in Finland in which 120 men with high cholesterol took 20 mg of Zocor daily for three months. On average, cholesterol levels were lowered by about 20 percent. But the researchers also found that blood levels of antioxidants dropped by 22 percent. Other studies have confirmed that statins deplete Coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10), a powerful antioxidant that fuels cellular energy production and repairs free radical damage to the heart muscle. Simply put: When CoQ10 is deficient, the heart is at risk.

The Finnish study also found that Zocor use increased insulin levels by 13 percent. This is enough of an increase to cause insulin sensitivity to drop, which can set the stage for insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes.

And finally, to cap it all off, low cholesterol can actually be harmful.

In a previous e-Alert, I asked HSI Panelist Allan Spreen, M.D., about low cholesterol, and he cited the Framingham Heart Study: “The largest, longest, and most prestigious heart disease study showed that total cholesterol levels (‘total,’ now, mind you, they didn’t talk a whole lot about LDL) that went below 160 caused heart disease problems to go back up! So it’s a curve that bottoms out at 160 instead of a line that gets better and better as you get lower and lower.”