Are Crestor Side Effects Worth a One Percent Benefit?

London, ONWhile it may not result in a Crestor lawsuit for some, statin patients are nonetheless sitting up and taking notice of the modern-day statin environment that appears to have healthy Americans, as well as those afflicted with heart disease or saddled with a high risk for stroke, taking statins in equal measure.

The debate, then, is the use of statins such as Crestor as a simple preventative, given the potential for Crestor side effects.

John Palmer knows all about that. An American born and raised in Michigan who moved to Canada to teach economics at The University of Western Ontario in 1971, Palmer regularly blogs about various issues at ElectEcon. Earlier this year he was blogging about his experience with Crestor.

“My father died of a heart attack when he was 43,” Palmer writes at ElectEcon (6/9/13). “My mother died of heart disease when she was 78. But three of my four grandparents lived into their 80s, and one grandmother lived to 96.

“This history, combined with my cholesterol blood readings, has led my family physician to recommend that I take statins as a preventive measure.”

Prescribed 10mg per day of Crestor, Palmer was soon dealing with muscle pain. Never sedentary and fond of hiking, Palmer started experiencing muscle pain while climbing multiple flights of stairs, amidst other everyday tasks within days of starting on Crestor. “I know I’m getting older, but this pain is just too serious and too different to think it is merely part of the aging/deterioration process,” he writes.

One of the more rare Crestor issues is Crestor rhabdoymylosis, a condition that sees the breaking down of muscle tissue and subsequent absorption into the bloodstream. In rare cases, rhabdoymylosis can lead to death. While Palmer did not articulate any concern for rhabdoymylosis, muscle and joint pain is a more common byproduct of Crestor.

Crestor diabetes is another. Less common than muscle and joint pain, but included in the basket of Crestor side effects nonetheless.

Palmer blogs that he tried taking his Crestor every other day (reducing his effective daily intake to 5mg) but it didn’t help. So he made the decision to stop taking it and control his LDL cholesterol levels in other ways, by eating healthier foods and getting more exercise.

In the meantime, the kind of muscle pain experienced by Palmer - and joint pain experienced by others - are Crestor issues that formed the basis of research published online earlier this year in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA Internal Medicine, 6/3/13). Researchers concluded that musculoskeletal conditions, arthropathies, injuries and general pain were more prevalent in patients taking statins than those who didn’t.

“While statins effectively lower cardiovascular illnesses and death,” wrote the study authors, “the full spectrum of statin musculoskeletal adverse events (AEs) is unknown. Statin-associated musculoskeletal AEs include a wide variety of clinical presentations, including muscle weakness, muscle cramps and tendinous (tendon) diseases.”

The takeaway here is that statins such as Crestor can effectively manage cardiovascular disease and stroke risk in susceptible patients. And their genesis was founded upon having something to give heart attack and stroke patients in an effort to prevent a second heart attack or stroke. For them, some joint and muscle pain would be a small price to pay in order to mitigate a second serious event in patients that are high risk.

However, the use of statins such as Crestor as a preventive measure in otherwise reasonably healthy people is coming into question.

“If you look at all the studies that have ever been done with statins for primary prevention, so for people who have never had a heart attack or a stroke, if you give a statin to a patient for about five years we can reduce the chance of a person having a heart attack or a stroke by about one percent,” said James McCormack, a professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of British Columbia, in comments published at CBC.ca (6/5/13).

Is a one percent reduction of risk for an otherwise healthy patient worth the potential for muscle and joint pain, and a corresponding risk for Crestor diabetes and other Crestor side effects? Some partners of Crestor patients have reported that highly active spouses prescribed Crestor as a preventative measure have been reduced to a sedentary existence and giving up activities vital to human health after having been overcome by joint and muscle pain, in exchange for a one percent benefit against heart attack and stroke risk while pharmaceuticals manufacturing statins rake in record profits. It will leave some thumbing their noses at statins. Others will file a Crestor lawsuit.

People like John Palmer are saying no to statins - especially when studies begin questioning their validity and benefit in healthy people. “This stuff raises serious doubts in my mind about continuing to take statins as a preventive measure.”