The Fringe News: statin drugs

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Sunday, November 19, 2017

Chocolate Gives Statins A $29 Billion Run For Their Money

With the blockbuster cholesterol-lowering class of drugs known as statins being widely promoted for the primary prevention of cardiovascular disease, despite their having over 300 documented adverse health effects (including heart failure!), how does chocolate sound as a viable, heart-friendly alternative?

We already connect amorously with chocolate (to the tune of 6 billion lbs of cocoa consumed annually worldwide), revealing in heart-felt expressions like “I love it,” and “this is to die for!” how comfortable we are with publicly declaring our affection. But did you know that while it makes our emotional hearts sing, it may actually keep our physical hearts happy, alive and ticking longer, as well?

Indeed, back in 2006, researchers found that for elderly men, eating cocoa intake was inversely associated with blood pressure and 15-year cardiovascular and all-cause mortality. When compared with the lowest tertile (lowest 33%) of cocoa intake, the adjusted relative risk for men in the highest tertile was .50 for cardiovascular mortality, or a 50% reduction, and .53 for all-cause mortality, or a 47% reduction. Not bad considering the median cocoa intake among users was 2.11 grams per day, or just one half an ounce a week. While many people are searching out supplements such as ubiquinol to combat the side effects of statin drugs, they could have been eating chocolate instead.

Anything that can reduce your risk of dying from all causes by 50%, which is not an expensive and potentially dangerous drug, but a food, should be be taken seriously, even if — paradoxically — it is usually found in the candy section of the grocery store.

There is no shortage of solid, human clinical research supporting the consumption of cocoa, the signature ingredient in chocolate, for the reduction of both cardiovascular disease risk factors, and “hard” cardiovascular outcomes, e.g. hypertension, endothelial dysfunction, insulin resistance, low HDL, stroke, heart disease, etc. GreenMedInfo.com has made 30 such studies available to view on its cocoa page.

The remarkable thing about the research on chocolate is that its consumption appears to improve the pathological condition of the blood vessels known as endothelial dysfunction, and which is believed to be at the root of the problem of plaque accumulation in the arteries, as well as elevated blood lipids. Statins may in fact exert their greatly exaggerated health benefits not by suppressing lipids (as popularly advertised), but by acting as a mild vasodilator through enhancing nitric oxide concentrations in the lining of the blood vessels (endothelium). Statins, however, are produced from chemicals, and therefore guarantee a certain degree of collateral poisoning will take place, whereas chocolate has a long history of safe use both as a food and a medicine. Chocolate has also been extensively researched for effectively lowering blood pressure in those who consume it, which is still considered one of the best ways to reduce cardiovascular disease risk, and which drug-based blood pressure medications are notoriously ineffective at, since they may actually raise cardiac mortality even while effectively lowering blood pressure. In a similar way, statins may effectively suppress blood lipids while at the same time weakening the heart muscle.

Some of cocoa/chocolate’s other potential health benefits include:

Inhibiting Accelerated Aging – Not only has the preference for chocolate in older age been linked with better health, optimism and better psychological well-being, but it has also been shown in the fruit fly-based experimental model of aging to have antioxidative, pro-oxidative, and metal-chelating effects associated with increased lifespan. Moreover, research in women shows that long-term ingestion of favanol-rich chocolate (raw chocolate is especially rich in these compounds) protects against UV-induced skin redness and improves their skin condition.

Protecting Against Alzheimers – Cocoa procyanidins attenuate lipid peroxidation associated neuronal cell death in a manner relevant to Alzheimer’s disease.

Reducing Stress (Elevated Catecholamines) – Daily consumption of 40 grams of chocolate during a 2 week period reduces the urinary excretion of cortisol and catecholamines, while reducing other metabolic indicators of stress, including gut microbial metabolism.

Inhibiting Cholesterol Oxidation – Rather than fixating on the absolute number of lipoproteins or cholesterol within the blood (quantitiative analysis) it makes sense to ensure that those lipids don’t undergo excessive oxidize (qualitative analysis) which is associated with injury to the blood vessels and the formation of atherosclerotic plaque. More than a few studies have found that chocolate prevents LDL cholesterol oxidation, while also boosting the beneficial HDL cholesterol

Boosting Cognitive Performance – Chocolate, along with flavonoid-rich red wine and tea, were shown to boost cognitive performance in elderly men and women, with the maximum effect at intacts of 10g/d, or the equivalent of 2 ½ ounces a week.

Inhibiting Cancer – Llimited, though significant research indicates that cocoa is capable of inhibiting certain types of cancer. The growth of prostate cancer cells have been selectively inhibited with cocoa polyphenols, and animal research indicates that cocoa liquor is capable of inhibiting chemically-induced liver cancer.

Improving Diabetes – New research from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition has revealed that the consumption of chocolate, or its active constituents (cocoa, flavan-3-ols), reduces a broad range of risk factors for cardiovascular disease including insulin resistance. The researchers looked at 42 acute and long-term studies and found a 33% median reduction in insulin resistance following chocolate consumption. What is so unique about this new study is that chocolate consumption is generally believed to elevate blood sugar and blood insulin levels; not only does it disprove this myth but it sheds additional light on why chocolate consumption (especially dark, organic) may be beneficial in both type 1 diabetes and type 2 diabetes.

Boosting Sexual Function – Chocolate is an excellent vasodilator, which is one reason why it has been traditionally linked to improved fertility and virility. Research also indicates that chocolate consumption is linked to higher sexual function in women, as well.

This is only a sampling from the research we have gathered on chocolate/cocoa’s potential health benefits, of which there are several dozen.

Lastly, any serious discussion on the medicinal properties of chocolate should be qualified by pointing out that chocolate is often unfairly traded, and has even been linked to child enslavement. Non-organic cocoa may also contain residues of the dangerous herbicide glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup), among many other biocides used in conventional farming, so the consumer must take special care to avoid these moral and physiological pitfalls. Also, because chocolate has complex pharmacologically active properties, it must be consumed in moderation, and with attention paid towards the tendency for using it to self-medicate, especially when the cocoa content is lower and the sugar content higher.

© November 18, 2017 GreenMedInfo LLC. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of GreenMedInfo LLC. Want to learn more from GreenMedInfo? Sign up for the newsletter here http://www.greenmedinfo.com/greenmed/newsletter.

The post Chocolate Gives Statins A $29 Billion Run For Their Money appeared first on The Sleuth Journal.

Wednesday, November 8, 2017

Statin Drugs Linked To Arthritis, Heart Trouble And More

Research revealing the broad spectrum toxicity of statin drugs continues to accumulate unabated. A study reveals that these cholesterol-lowering drugs may be contributing to an epidemic of arthritis and autoimmunity in exposed populations, adding to a growing body of clinical evidence that they may cause over 300 adverse health effects.

Published this month in the journal Arthritis Research & Therapy, and titled “Statins accelerate the onset of collagen type II-induced arthritis in mice,” researchers found that 100% of the animals given statin drugs developed arthritis and markers of autoimmunity versus 58% in the control population who did not receive them.[1]

The study was performed in the wake of an observational study showing that statin drug use was associated with an increased risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis.[2] The researchers hypothesized that statin drug use may eventually lead to dysregulation of immune responses, possibly resulting in autoimmunity. This finding does not come as a great surprise considering that statins have already been linked to lupus-like syndrome,[3] as well as immune-mediated necrotizing myopathy.[4]

Because atherosclerosis is known to have an autoimmune component, the emerging connection between statins and autoimmunity may undermine the justification for their continued use in the primary prevention of heart disease. Lesions form in an artery only after the body’s immune system snowballs out of control. White blood cells (macrophages and T-lymphoctyles) infiltrate the damaged area in an attempt to heal it, absorbing oxidized-LDL in the process, and eventually depositing in the artery wall as foam cells, triggering more white blood cells to infiltrate in a vicious cycle.

The blood work of heart disease patients has also shown elevations of a well-known marker of autoimmunity in the blood, namely, antinuclear antibodies.[5] What is more concerning is that statin drugs have been shown to induce elevations of these same antibodies,[6]not only calling into question their utility in preventing heart disease, but implicating them as potentially cardiotoxic agents.

Indeed, the cardiotoxicity of statin drugs was demonstrated back in 2009 when the journal of Clinical Cardiology showed that statin drugs actually weaken the heart muscle.[7] In addition, the GreenMedInfo.com statin drugs research page now contains 76 studies indicating the myotoxicity (muscle-damaging) effect of statins and 53 studies indicating their neurotoxicity (nerve-damaging). Since the heart is a highly innervated muscle, using them for “protecting” the heart is an insurmountable contradiction.

Wednesday, August 2, 2017

Consumer Alert: 300+ Health Problems Linked To Statin Drugs

A growing body of clinical research now indicates that the cholesterol-lowering class of drugs known as statins, are associated with over 300 adverse health effects — research boldly flying in the face of national health policy, medical insurance premium guidelines, statin drug manufacturer advertising claims, and the general sentiment of the public, with approximately 1 in every 4 adult Americans over 45 currently using these drugs to “prevent heart disease.”

The Cholesterol Myth

For well over 40 years, statin drugs have successfully concretized a century old myth about the primary cause of heart disease: namely, that cholesterol “causes” plaque build up in the arteries, ultimately leading to obstruction of blood flow, and subsequent morbidity and mortality.

Indeed, the medical establishment and drug companies have been singing the praises of this “cholesterol myth,” to the tune of 25 billion dollars in statin drug sales, annually.

While it is true that oxidized low-density lipoprotein is found within the atheromatous plaque that is found in damaged arteries, it is less likely a cause than an effect of heart disease. The underlying damage to the lining of the artery, which could be infectious, chemical, stress and/or nutritionally-related, comes before the immune response that results in plaque buildup there. Blaming LDL cholesterol for causing heart disease, is like blaming the scab for the injury that caused it to form, or, like blaming the band-aid for the scab it is covering — this is, after all, the inborn and fatal flaw of allopathic medicine which focuses only on symptoms of disease, which it then — fool-heartedly — attempts to suppress by any chemical means necessary.

Death By Statins?

No one can deny that statins do exactly what they are designed to do: suppress cholesterol production and reduce measurable blood serum levels. The question is, rather, at what price do they accomplish this feat, and for what ultimate purpose?

With the National Cholesterol Education Program Guidelines, having been designed by “experts” on the payroll of statin drug manufacturers, requiring ultra-low levels to obtain a strictly theoretical and numerical definition of “health,” statin drugs are guaranteed to receive first-line treatment status in the goal of the preventing and treating heart disease through lipid suppression.

What is at question here, is whether the unintended, adverse effects of this chemical class of drugs are less, the same or worse than the purported “cardiovascular” benefits they provide?

Fundamentally, statin drugs damage the muscles and nerves in the body — so much so that a dose as low as 5 mg a day (albeit in rare cases) can kill a human. There are well over 100 studies demonstrating the myotoxic, or muscle-harming effects of these drugs, and over 80 demonstrating the effects of nerve damage, as well. When you consider that a vast proportion of our body is comprised of muscles and coordinating nerve systems, this drug has the potential to cause damage to the entire body, and undoubtedly does so universally, differing only in the matter of degree — the damage occurring acutely in those at the tip of the iceberg, asymptomatically in the majority of others at the base.

Moreover, statin myotoxicity is not exclusive to skeletal muscle. If you consider that the heart is also a muscle, in fact, is our most tireless muscle, an obvious red flag should go up. It is a remarkable fact that it took over 40 years before the biomedical research and publishing fields were able to produce a human study, like the one published in the Journal of Clinical Cardiology in Dec. 2009, showing that statin drugs, despite billions of advertising/marketing dollars to the contrary, actually weaken the heart muscle.

These results, while disturbing, are to be expected given the well-known problem associated with statin drug use, namely, the inhibition of the mevalonate pathway necessary to produce the heart-essential nutrient coenzyme Q10. Coenzyme Q10 deficiency itself may be a major contributing cause to heart disease. There is also research that statin drugs deplete the body of the cardioprotective minerals (and associated mineral-protein complexes) zinc and selenium. This finding may also explain why rates of heart failure may be increasing in the general population given these drugs.

While the discovery that statin drugs, instead of preventing heart disease, likely contribute to it, is surprising and counterintuitive, it should not distract from the more disturbing discovery that they contribute to over 300 disease and/or adverse health effects.

Millions of statin drugs users around the globe are risking their lives on a bad bet that taking a magic chemical pill will reduce their risk of dying of a disease that is not caused by a lack of the drug. What is more likely to happen, however, is that the quality and duration of their lives will be reduced, profoundly, along with billions of dollars of squandered cash that could have been spent on authentically medicinal and cardioprotective foods, nutrients, minerals and vitamins.

In light of these findings, a very serious question is raised: are those who are party to the manufacture, promotion, administration and/or prescribing of this chemical class of drugs, in violation of the medical ethical principle of informed consent? And is this ethical violation, insofar as it results in injury to those who have been mislead and/or coerced to take these drugs, also a legal/criminal one?

Additional Research Links

Natural Cholesterol Lowering Agents

Natural Substances Which Reduce Cardiac Mortality

Natural Substances Which May Unclog Arteries

© August 2, 2017 GreenMedInfo LLC. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of GreenMedInfo LLC. Want to learn more from GreenMedInfo? Sign up for the newsletter here http://www.greenmedinfo.com/greenmed/newsletter.

Sunday, July 30, 2017

Cleveland Clinic Dr. Shamelessly Promotes Statin Drugs Calling Side Effects ‘Imagined’

Claiming a ‘Deadly Internet-Driven Cult’ is driving poor statin drug sales, a prominent cardiologist says the hundreds of ‘side effects’ reported in the peer-reviewed medical literature and by patients are just ‘imagined.’

Medpage Today just published an article titled, “ CardioBrief: Statin Denialism Is ‘A Deadly Internet-Driven Cult’,” which features the opinion of Steven Nissen, a prominent Cleveland Clinic cardiologist, who claims that internet-driven “statin denial” is having deadly consequences, citing statistics in an editorial in Annals of Internal Medicine that only 61% of people given a prescription for a statin were adherent at 3 months.

Nissen’s scathing editorial states:

“we are losing the battle for the hearts and minds of our patients to Web sites developed by people with little or no scientific expertise, who often pedal ‘natural’ or ‘drug-free’ remedies for elevated cholesterol levels.” The anti-statin forces employ two distinct strategies, “statin denial, the proposition that cholesterol is not related to heart disease, and statin fear, the notion that lowering serum cholesterol levels will cause serious adverse effects.”

Nissen goes so far as to suggest that side effects patients experience from statin drugs are a byproduct of the nocebo effect, i.e. are just ’in their heads.’

Unlike Nissen, we take statin drug toxicity very seriously, and have dedicated an entire database on our site to indexing the hundreds of peer-reviewed studies indicating over three hundred distinct signals of harm associated with exposure to this class of drug. The top 10 of 300+ diseases linked to statins are:

Muscle Damage (Myopathies)

Liver Damage

Type 2 Diabetes

Cancer

Pancreatitis

Oxidative Stress

Cataracts

Peripheral Neuropathy

Cognitive Decline/Dysfunction

We issued a consumer alert on the topic in 2012, and continue to make this growing iatrogenic problem a core advocacy of ours. In addition to our completely free resource, we have made available for download our 559 page statin drug toxicity research PDF which you have permission to distribute far and wide [no cost].

We also recommend you read our expose on statins, entitled, “Cracking the Cholesterol Myth: How Statins Harm The Body and Mind,” wherein we reveal how statistical and semantic manipulation of statin clinical trials misrepresent their safety and efficacy, driving the 30 billion dollar a year blockbuster drug class.

Nissen actually blames another $30 billion dollar a year industry — — the dietary supplement industry — and internet health sites for the bad reputation, and poor compliance with, statin drugs. He claims these sites sell an “array of worthless or harmful dietary supplements,” and believes alternative health information sites, and even mainstream shows like Dr. Oz, are riddled with deep conflicts of interests.

This all seems like a diversion tactic, when you consider that Nissen himself has been a subject of criticism by Forbes for his own conflicts of interest: “Steven Nissen, Conflicts Of Interest, And The New Cholesterol Drugs.”

Source: https://www.acponline.org/authors/conflictFormServlet/M17-1566/ICMJE/M17-1566-Conflicts.pdf

Dr. Jason Fung writes about Nissen’s conflicts of interest in a recent op-ed published on Medium.com:

“[L]et’s look at Dr. Nissen’s payments from Big Pharma. According to ProPublica, Dr. Nissen had scored a cool $80,000 payday from drug firms last year. Nice. Oh, right, further he received money from 3 of the biggest drug firms (Amgen, Pfizer, and Astra Zeneca) on the planet to do research and write papers. Dr. Nissen hysterically claims that cults are scaring people away from life saving statins and that if we listened to them, everybody would die. Funny, Dr. Nissen seems to be engaging in a lot of fear mongering himself to scare people into taking their (highly-profitable) medications.”

The Forbes article, written in 2015, points out how at that time, Nissen was an outspoken supporter of two new ‘highly promising’ cholesterol drugs from Amgen and Sanofi/Regeneron, despite the fact that the clinical trials used surrogate outcomes, such as LDL cholesterol levels, instead of outcome data (e.g. cardiovascular or all-cause mortality) which is the only unequivocal standard of proof for their clinical benefit and safety.

According to CNBC, Nissen was more liberal about these drugs than some other experts and many of the panel members:

“I am somebody who generally is opposed to approving drugs on the basis of surrogate endpoints without the outcome data,” Nissen said by telephone Wednesday, referring to lowering of LDL cholesterol already shown by the medicine. “However, in this case, I actually support approval and I actually think the concerns of the committee are not on target.”

Also featured, is Nissen’s statement on the NBC Nightly News program, which conveys a degree of exuberance you would not expect from a self-described “physician-scientist,’ but is all too common in pharmaceutical advertising copy:

“These drugs are breakthrough drugs, they are blockbuster drugs that are very likely going to have a big impact.”

Even if we give Nissen the benefit of the doubt, and assume he really does believe that it’s sensationalism on the internet and not the toxicity of the drugs themselves that is standing in the way of their widespread acceptance, he compromises his credibility with demagogic rhetoric:

“Many lives have been lost or impaired because of statin non-compliance. There is a special place in hell for people who use fear tactics and misinformation to promote books and natural health aids, including crazy diets, at the expense of proven medical therapies, rather than as complimentary [sic] options under medical direction. I am not sure why Americans are so susceptible to these charlatans.”

It is difficult to read these words without wondering who really is the source of misinformation here. The evidence showing that statins are causing great harm for little proven benefit is so compelling at this point, Nissen’s rhetoric seems recklessly contrary to the most basic precautionary principle of ethical medicine practices (i.e. first do no harm). Nissen is suggesting that non-participation in statin drug therapy could endanger lives, despite the logical fact that heart disease is not caused by a lack of any drug, much less a statin. By diverting attention from the dangers of the drugs themselves, and by ignoring the importance of identifying, understanding, and resolving the root causes of inflammation and cardiovascular disease, he and the pharmaceutical agenda he represents are doing a great disservice to public health. No amount of blaming the victim — both the patients who suffer statin toxicity, or health advocates who provide alternative information to the public — will absolve the disservice they are doing to the informed consent model of medicine.

We truly hope that health professionals and laypersons alike will continue to use the resources on our site to obtain information necessary to choose and practice informed consent medicine. Use our Research Dashboard to search over 10,000 topics.

A final note on the question of cholesterol’s role in heart disease. According to Nissen, the second prong of statin-denialism is denying that cholesterol is causally related to heart disease. While we won’t go into great depth here on the highly complex and hotly contested subject, it is true that cholesterol’s role in cardiovascular disease causation is greatly misunderstood. First, cholesterol is not LDL, nor, low density lipoprotein, despite the colloquial use of these terms synonymously. Lipoproteins render fat soluble substances like cholesterol water soluble, so it can be delivered by the LDL transporter throughout the body where it is integral to hormonal, neurologic, and synthetic bodily processes. I think Uffne Ravnoskov, PhD, MD, has done a good job of demythologizing cholesterol’s supposed cardiotoxicity, and you can get plenty of information on the topic on his website. I have even reported on health problems associated with low cholesterol. And so, you won’t see us advocating a copy-cat approach of using ‘nutraceuticals’ to “lower cholesterol naturally,” even if the approach is much safer and more effective at supporting heart health than a pharmaceutical one. In other words, there is a danger of oversimplification in both directions. For instance, oxidized LDL can actually have atherogenic properties. A concept that is anathema to orthodox medical thinking is that any given blood measure reflects body-wide health and not simply an isolated problematic finding with a magic bullet cure. Importantly, each measurable biological variable has inter-relations with a practically infinite number of other variables, most of which will never be measurable empirically. This is where the evidence itself terminates in a kind of humility and openness that requires we trust our body and intuition, using lifestyle interventions to heal in ways that cannot be replicated by a synthetic molecule.

View the GreenMedInfo database on Statin Drug Toxicity, linking this drug class to over 300 different conditions.

© July 30, 2017 GreenMedInfo LLC. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of GreenMedInfo LLC. Want to learn more from GreenMedInfo? Sign up for the newsletter here http://www.greenmedinfo.com/greenmed/newsletter.

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