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Monday, 26 October 2009 Confusion as statins seem to up diabetes riskNew research published in the journal Diabetes Care suggests we still don’t really understand how the cholesterol-lowering drugs statins work.
Doctors believe statins have a major role to play in reducing cholesterol. Rajpathak stressed that the benefits of statins on heart disease ‘by far outweigh any detrimental effects on ... diabetes risk.’ But this research suggests that they still do not know how the drugs work which will raise questions about whether they should be so widely used. ‘Contrary to our expectation,’ Rajpathak told Reuters Health, ‘we did not find any benefit of statins on diabetes risk. In fact, there is a suggestion that statins may be associated with increased risk - which needs to be explored further.’ Current guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence for England and Wales, and SIGN in Scotland, recommend that anyone believed to have a one in five or greater risk of developing cardiovascular disease over 10 years should be taking a statin. This translates into about 1 in four adults over 40. But earlier this year the UK’s drugs tsar Roger Boyle suggested statins should be more widely prescribed as they appear to reduce heart attack risk. Malehealth editor Jim Pollard said: 'ever since cerivastatin was removed from the US and European markets in 2001 because of a link to rhabdomyolysis, a muscle-wasting disease that can cause kidney failure, statins have been controversial. This research while not particularly alarming in itself adds to the impression that we still don't really know how statins work. Given that we also don't really know the relationship between cholesterol, which statins lower, and heart disease, there seem to be just one or two too many unknowns to justify giving these drugs to otherwise healthy people.'
Page last updated: 26/10/2009
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 TOP 10 HEALTH WEBSITES JIM POLLARD. MALEHEALTH EDITOR ROYAL SOCIETY OF MEDICINE Medical Website of the Year 2004
'The most comprehensive source of information about men's health matters on the web' '...for reliable online health advice, this is one of the better reference sites, containing up-front, independent information. Of use to most men, health-concious or otherwise.'
The Department of Health has provided funding to the Men's Health Forum, assisting the provision of health information and advice.
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Contrary to expections, it seems that taking the drugs may slightly increase the risk of diabetes. Dr. Swapnil Rajpathak of the of Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York and his team pooled data from six trials covering some 57,000 adults. Taken as whole, treatment with statins increased the risk of diabetes by 6%. But if one Scottish trial which, contrary to all the others, suggested statins actually protect against diabetes is excluded, the remaining five showed an increased risk of 13%.
