Statin Guide

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By Martha Miller Johnson

The cholesterol-lowering statin drugs may not be perfect, but they are saving lives.

Love them or hate them, statins are here to stay.

If you’ve been diagnosed with high cholesterol, chances are your doctor will recommend taking one. Here’s what you need to know to make an informed choice.

You may have read that the cholesterol-lowering drugs—taken daily by 13 million Americans—have been linked with memory loss, aches, and even cancer. Doctors are sometimes accused of overprescribing them, allowing drug companies to reap billions in sales and make staggering profits.

Yet statins have some of the most clear and convincing data in medicine that they reduce deaths from heart attacks and stroke.

They save lives—lots of them. And of the six single-ingredient statins, three are available in generic form, so they’re also affordable.

Standard doses of the six major statins—lovastatin, simvastatin, pravastatin, atorvastatin, rosuvastatin, and fluvastatin—reduce the level of low-density lipoprotein (LDL), or “bad” cholesterol, by 30–45 percent. They also reduce total cholesterol and triglycerides and may slightly increase high-density lipoprotein (HDL), or “good” cholesterol.

Paul D. Thompson, M.D., director of cardiology at Hartford Hospital in Hartford, Conn., takes a statin himself. Thompson does do some consulting work for pharmaceutical companies, but he says he prescribes a lot of generic statins.

“Statins are remarkable,” he says. “If you look at cardio databases worldwide, the number of heart operations and angioplasties are going down even though the population is aging. Statins are one of the reasons. I don’t know a lot of cardiologists who are middle age who don’t take one.”