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Segal was one of 24 million people taking drugs to lower cholesterol in the U.S. that year. The workhorse of American medicine, statins - first sold in the U.S. in 1987 and marketed under brand names like Lipitor, Zocor and Crestor - are designed to clear away LDL cholesterol, the waxy buildup that can clog arteries and trigger heart attacks and strokes. Doctors say the majority of current statin users are healthy people who don't have heart disease but who, like Segal, simply have high cholesterol. Use among this group, known as the primary prevention population, has made these drugs...
...some of the lost weight, and after two years, average weight loss was about 9 lb. Only about 15% of participants were able to lose 10% of their body weight or more. Across the board, however, patients lowered their risk of diabetes and reduced blood levels of bad cholesterol (LDL) while increasing good cholesterol (HDL) and overall heart health...
...Archives of Internal Medicine, scientists at Tel Aviv University found that patients taking statins for up to five years reduced their risk of death from any cause by 45%, compared with those not taking statins. Granted, most of the people who benefited had high levels of LDL cholesterol, the "bad" cholesterol, to start, so they were more likely than others to be helped by the drugs' ability to prevent plaque build-up in artery walls. But many patients also had never had a heart attack or other heart event. That means statins may have helped stave off such an event...
...that's the case, it would add to the growing list of statins' unexpected benefits. Initially the drugs were designed to inhibit the liver's ability to make cholesterol, but it turned out that they not only lowered LDL, but raised levels of HDL, or good cholesterol, in the blood as well. In the early 2000s, researchers reported that statins also reduced inflammation, a process that appears to contribute to the rupture of unstable plaques in the heart vessels, which triggers heart attack...
Although JUPITER (Justification for the Use of Statins in the Prevention: an Intervention Trial Evaluating Rosuvastatin) was designed to study inflammation, its findings also underscore the risk of high cholesterol. The study's statin group clearly benefited from reducing CRP, but they had also simultaneously lowered their LDL levels to nearly 50% below the government-prescribed target of 100 mg/dL. Experts say the JUPITER results may prompt serious rethinking of the current guidelines - an issue that health officials have already been debating in recent years. "I would not be surprised if, given these results, we determined that normal LDL should...