What doctors say about statins when patients aren’t listening

When a group of experts from the Mayo Clinic get together to talk about statin drugs, things are said they probably hope patients will never hear!

Because if you were invited to this “roundtable” discussion, you wouldn’t need to think twice about popping a Lipitor pill. You’d never fill the Rx in the first place.

First, the group discussed what they called “statin intolerance.”

They all agreed that it’s reported so frequently, “there seems to be something going on there.” (That’s real scientific talk, don’t you think!)

And one doctor — a big statin drug enthusiast — warned that high-dose statin therapy should be avoided in the elderly, and to be “very careful” with patients who have kidney disease, muscle “problems,” arthritis, and anyone who is statin “sensitive.”

(So who’s left?)

But the real problem, these experts said, appears to be that the drug trials don’t account for the people who get side effects. Basically, if the drug they give you causes a problem — big or small — you don’t get invited back!

Put simply, by the director of sports cardiology at the Mayo Clinic no less, “they weeded out the patients who didn’t tolerate the drug.”

And it’s not just for statin drugs. That’s the way most clinical trials are done. They involve “run-in” periods in which people are given the drugs being tested.

And if it makes you nauseous, gives you hives, sends you to the hospital…well, that’s that. The welcome mat is taken back.

It’s a bit like the Seinfeld joke — only in this case, “No more clinical trial for you!”

Sources: Nutrition, April 2, 2014, ajcn.nutrition.org
“Statin intolerance and diabetes risk: what do we know?” Medscape multispecialty, November 24, 2014, Medscape.com