While some universities study statins' effects on muscles based on specific genes, locally, in the Sacramento-Davis regional area, the University of California, Davis also studies how to use nutrients from foods for health benefits, for example, the flavanol-rich foods.
For example, according to the July 30, 2010, UC Davis article, "Flavanol-rich foods may help heart disease patients study suggests," research by an international team of scientists, including a University of California, Davis, nutritionist, provides new evidence that cocoa and other foods rich in a class of nutrients known as flavanols may improve the health of people with coronary artery disease, the nation’s leading cause of death.
Findings from the study, a collaborative effort by researchers at UC Davis; UC San Francisco; the Heinrich Heine University in Dusseldorf, Germany; and the candy company Mars, Inc., appear in the July 2010 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. See the study. The study results indicate that flavanols may increase a population of certain cells in the blood that scientists think help to repair the inner walls of blood vessels, improving blood flow and potentially lowering blood pressure.
This suggests that, in the future, isolated flavanols or flavanol-rich foods might be useful in preventing or possibly even treating coronary artery disease, in which the arteries narrow as plaque builds up on the endothelium lining the inner artery walls, said study co-author Carl Keen. A UC Davis nutrition professor, Keen is an authority on the potential health benefits of this class of phytonutrients.
Tailoring Statins or Foods to Your Genes
If you've ever wondered why some people have muscle pain or similar adverse reactions to statins and other people don't experience many side effects? It could be because of a specific gene that may predispose you to muscle problems if you take statins and your atrogin-1 gene gets turned on by some types of drugs or injury. If you take statins, are you getting tested regularly for elevated liver enzymes?
You can't really say anything against the statins industries because you'll hear the opposite view from doctors, manufacturers, and public relations firms. So you have to say there are two sides to every story, and there are.
Sometimes it helps if you can find a way to tailor your medicines to your genes (or lack of a specific gene). On the other hand, you can use nutrition, specific foods and food extracts to help you if and when you find out whether or not you have a specific gene that makes your prescription medicines affect you as they do.
Most statin users describe a wide variety of symptoms or no symptoms. At the most extreme end of the side effects spectrum is a severe breakdown of skeletal muscle known as rhabdomyolysis, according to researchers at Harvard Medical School (HMS). Rhabdomyolysis is the breakdown of muscle fibers resulting in the release of muscle fiber contents (myoglobin) into the bloodstream. Some of these are harmful to the kidney and frequently result in kidney damage.
Are any of your muscles wasting away? Did you have yourself tested to see whether you carry the atrogin-1 gene? Did any injury, drug, or prescription medicine happen to suddenly switch on your atrogin-1 gene, if you have that gene and it gets switched on by any number of causes?
When muscle is damaged, a protein pigment called myoglobin is released into the bloodstream and filtered out of the body by the kidneys. Myoglobin breaks down into potentially harmful compounds. It may block the structures of the kidney, causing damage such as acute tubular necrosis or kidney failure.
Dead muscle tissue may cause a large amount of fluid to move from the blood into the muscle, reducing the fluid volume of the body and leading to shock and reduced blood flow to the kidneys. The disorder may be caused by any condition that results in damage to skeletal muscle, especially trauma, according to the Rhabdomyolysis site from Google Health.
What's the cause? According to the Google Health site, Rhabdomyolysis, the cause is "use or overdose of drugs, especially cocaine, amphetamines, statins, heroin, or PCP. Interestinly, the site mentions the word, 'statins.' Could there be a genetic reason why some people get a severe breakdown of skeletal muscle known as rhabdomyolysis, and other people don't feel any symptoms at all? Could some people carry a gene and others don't have this specific gene?
Or maybe you only have a mild muscle soreness or mild cramps. How do you know which type of pain is symptomatic, which is about muscle weakness, or whether you have actual pain? How do you quantitate what you feel? Check out the November 28, 2007 ScienceDaily news article, "Gene Responsible for Statin-Induced Muscle Pain Identified."
Statins lower cholesterol by inhibiting HMG-CoA reductase, a key enzyme in cholesterol synthesis. Around 2002, the study's co-senior author Stewart Lecker, MD, PhD, and colleagues in the Harvard Medical School laboratory of Alfred Goldberg, MD, first discovered the atrogin-1 gene, so named for its role in muscle atrophy.
Basically, researchers found that if you are experiencing wasting muscle, the atrogin-1 gene is rapidly switched on. What happens when your muscles begin to waste away? Maybe you're not using your muscles. That's one way they start to waste away.
Muscle wasting occurs in a large number of disease states, including cancer, AIDS, and kidney disease and can also occur when muscles are underused due to injury or lack of exercise. So if your atrogin-1 gene is not activated by some of your muscles wasting away, then the whole process of muscle atrophy is stopped or slowed down. Whether you're injured or not using any particular muscle for whatever reason, atrogin-1 has been found in every existing model of muscle wasting.
Scientists began to research back in 2002 the question of whether cholesterol-lowering statins might also be switching on this gene called atrogin-1.The scientists reasoned that 1. atrogin-1 plays a key role in the wasting away of skeletal muscle, and 2. Perhaps the atrogin-1 gene, when switched on, also plays a role in why some patients are sensitive to statins.
The Harvard research conducted three separate experiments to test their hypothesis. According to the Science Daily article, "Gene Responsible for Statin-Induced Muscle Pain Identified," the scientists first looked at how the atrogin-1 gene had been expressed. They examined the biopsies of 19 human quadricep muscles from five control patients, six patients with muscle pain who were not being treated with statins and eight patients with muscle pain/damage who were using statins. Their results showed that atrogin-1 expression was significantly higher among the statin users.
Could it be that if you have a specific gene, you're more likely to have an adverse reaction from statins? Next, the scientists studied statins' effects on cultured muscle cells treated with various concentrations of lovastatin.
Now remember, even if you take red yeast rice to avoid prescription statins, and you've been told that red yeast rice has a different formation of molecules than some commercial statins, you're still getting the lovastatin in the red yeast rice because red yeast rice contains some lovastatin in its natural form. Lovastatin is found in red yeast rice.
The scientists looked at lovastatin, not red yeast rice. The researchers compared the lovastatin with control samples. As the study progressed, the lovastatin-treated cells became progressively thinner and more damaged. But remarkably, say the authors, according to the Science Daily article, the cells "lacking the atrogin-1 gene were resistant to statins' deleterious effects."
Zebrafish were fed lovastatin. And the zebra fish showed that just as in mammalian muscle cell culture, lovastatin led to muscle damage, even at low concentrations; as the concentration was increased, so too was the damage. And, once again, they observed that fish lacking the atrogin-1 gene were resistant to statin-induced damage.
So perhaps you should find out whether or not you have the atrogin-1 gene before you take statins. You could use other means such as niacin or fish oil to manage your cholesterol, but that, again, is between you and your health care team. That's why the science of pharmacogenomics is still in its infancy. But it opens the door to the prospect of tailoring your medicines to your genes.
What About the Lovastatin in Red Yeast Rice?
The way the molecules could be set up in red yeast rice may differ somewhat from the prescription stations. To read more on this subject, see the article, Red Yeast Rice - What You Need to Know About Red Yeast Rice. Look at the various containers of red yeast rice on the shelves at local health food stores. And check out the Mayo Clinic article, Red Yeast Rice.
On the other hand, the US Food and Drug Administration issued a warning to consumers not to purchase three types of red yeast rice products from online suppliers. Read this article warning consumers, "Avoid Online Red Yeast Rice; Contains Lovastatin | InjuryBoard. There's a controversy about the lovastatin in read yeast rice. See Red Yeast Rice Supplements May Contain Lovastatin.
One of the active ingredients naturally produced when rice is fermented by red yeast is Monacolin K, or Lovastatin which is the generic equivalent of one of the statin drugs. Unlike prescription Lovastatin which contains 10 mg or more of this active ingredient, red yeast rice contains less than 2.5 mg of the cholesterol lowering medication per 600 mg capsule.
Red yeast rice has been marketed as a dietary supplement under various names. To find out which names or brands, read the article, "Don't Buy Red Yeast Rice Until You Read This Article."
So if you use red yeast rice, your doctor should know which brand or type is free from citrinin. There's one brand that is mentioned in the book, The Cholesterol Hoax, by Dr. Sherry A. Rogers, that is noted in the book as being free of citrinin. That brand mentioned in the book is Wakunaga's Kyolic Formula 107 Red Yeast Rice, according to page 49 in the book, The Cholesterol Hoax, published in 2008 by Prestige Publishing. See, Kyolic Red Yeast Rice Formula 107 240 caps Wakunaga of America.
Locally, patients keep asking whether high-dose statins are really necessary. Not every doctor mentions side effects in detail or even tells patients that the COQ10 is taken out by the statins and probably need to be replaced. There's too much mystery in Sacramento about statins being given to people of all ages. Scientists are constantly searching for old diseases to treat with new drugs and new diseases to treat with old drugs.
Are Doctors Pushed to Prescribe Big Pharma Statins?
There's a troubling article in the March, 2010 issue of Life Extension magazine, "Lower Cholesterol Safely," by Robert Haas, M.S. On page 26 of the article, the article reports that many doctors may have been misled by "Big Pharma." The question asked is why there's such a casual attitude about statin drugs, say compared to a natural form of statin, red yeast rice, if a brand selected is free from toxins. The article notes one cardiologist's observance, "You can't go to a cardiology conference and ask who's on statins without everyone's hand going up."
The article also noted a 2009 investigative report that disclosed to large pharmaceutical firms (and the article names the companies) offered Canadian doctors $100 for every new patient they put on statins. That article also mentioned the financial ties of a doctor (named in the article) to the big pharmacy company as a paid speaker.
Additional Resource Links
Gene Responsible For Statin-induced Muscle Pain Identified - Nov 28, 2007
Side Effects of LIPITOR ® - Side Effect Information for LIPITOR ® (atorvastatin calcium).
Statins Muscle Pain
Statin side effects: Weigh the benefits and risks - MayoClinic.com - Oct 30, 2008 ...
Muscle Pain and Statins
Major Side Effects of Statin Drugs
Most Common Statin Side Effects - Muscle Pain
Is Your Doctor in Denial? - Washington Post
Lipitor, Neuromuscular Degeneration, and Recovery
Simvastatin Side Effects | Drugs.com
Do You Take Any of These 11 Dangerous Cholesterol Drugs? - Jul 20, 2010
Statins: Doctors fear for some, the side effects - Mar 30, 2010
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