Atorvastatin

Have you also experienced depression, extreme fatigue and libido problems?  These are also common on statins.

I decided last year that I'd rather risk another heart attack than stay on statins because life just wasn't worth living. 

After my heart op - triple bypass and aortic valve replacement, NONE caused by highy cholesterol - mine has always been fine - they put me on 40mg Simvastatin and when I asked how long, my cardiologist said, "Oh.  For the rest of your life, of course."

Not once since I had the operation nearly 3 years ago, has he even mentioned side effects, much less counseled me about them.  And let me tell ya, for the statins they are REAL.  And substantial.  I was forgetting my bank account number, which I had remembered hundreds of times since I started that account decades ago, plus who knows what I was not remembering now that I was not remembering what I needed to remember...  I could go on...

I went off of them on April 29, have only been off of them for half a month, and my memory is already starting to go back to normal.

Being told to these statins blindly and without weighing what good they will actually do for you - which may be VERY marginal, as in slim to none - is criminal IMHO and should be outlawed.   We take them because we believe in our caretakers, they should know, right?  

Heh heh...

Statins are routinely prescribed after heart attacks as a precaution irrespective of whether  cholesterol level is high or low.  We all know that virtually all drugs have side effects.  Equally one would like to avoid having another heart attack and it's a question of weighing up the pros and cons. 

It's great that you are having extensive blood tests.  I too had a heart attack about a year ago but, due to satisfactory blood results, have been able to reduce my Atorvastatin to 20mgs per day and side effects have been similarly reduced. 

I'd love to come off all medication but don't particularly wish to drop dead of another heart attack at this moment in time.

Let's keep it real folks.  I'm not a smoker nor a drinker.  I eat healthily and exercise daily.  Always have done.  Still had a heart attack.  Am being regularly monitored and am on relatively low doses of medication.  Maybe these doses are keeping me up and running  - who knows?  You may know what feels right for you but are you in a position to prescribe for chris51153?  I think not. 

Wait for the results of your blood tests and then take it from there.  Good luck.

Alex

I feel what you are saying, and respect those thoughts.  Just can't agree with you.

You said, "Statins are routinely prescribed after heart attacks as a precaution irrespective of whether  cholesterol level is high or low.  We all know that virtually all drugs have side effects." 

You sound exactly like my cardiologist, a highly respected one in our community, head of cardiology where I have my heart care monitored for the procedure I had to have done in June of 2012.  (With my cardiologist never once counseling me on the side effects of anything he was prescribing, while seeing me once every 3-4 months since then, usually personally and sometimes with me being seen by other cardiology doctors in the department, all of whom report to him.  He comes from exactly that point of view.  His statement to me: "All drugs have side effects.")

I am not trying to say anybody here should or should not take the statins, I am NOT advising NOT taking them, I am not a doctor and am not pretending to be one.  I am saying that it seems wrong to me for doctors to simply be sweeping those side effects under the rug and to NOT be counseling each and every patient that in the case of statins, these side effects can be permanently debilitating/damaging, as the warning about statins appearing on the FDA's website openly declares (use .gov, not .com, and type "Statin side effects" in the search box).  And that the patient should be told that.  

You said, "Equally one would like to avoid having another heart attack and it's a question of weighing up the pros and cons."  Exactly.  Patients assume that unless mentioned, side effects will be negligible compared to having another heart episode.  In the case of statins the effects are anything but negigible, and I want patients of HAVE the pros and cons to weigh.

In my case my 40mg of Atorv was reduced to 20mg by my cardiologist when I told him about the memory issues I was having, still enough memory issues stayed in place for me to know they were still causing problems even at that lowered dosage.  I don't like not knowing what it is that I don't know I don't know.  Or what should be naturally occuring to me in the form of memories, and is not.  It's like hearing music from a regular grade audio system all your life.  You don't know what you're missing until you hear a Mark Levinson system in action, and things you never knew existed leap out at you and surround you and immerse you in your experience.  I want to have my mind be fully accessible to me, and not a patchwork quilt with peices missing, like it becomes on the statins.

My heart condition did not involve a heart attack, BTW, it was non-cholesterol related stenosis of the aortic valve, causing my normally 4cm opening to be at .82cm, 1/4 of what it should be.  And triple bypass, of 3 spindly blood vessels feeding my heart that should have been thick and full, as is normal, which it appears were damaged by the 6 months of radiation therapy I had to endure in 1980 due to Hodgkins Disease.  This Hodgkins Disease has also caused my thyroid to be weaker than it should, since my thyroid gland was hit by the rays too, so I take 100mcg of Levothyroxine daily, which is also on the list of drugs causing memory issues.  Unfortunately I can't just stop taking thyroid supplementation, that WOULD be inadvisable.  Perhaps in my case the one exacerbates the negative effects of the other, meaning I should only take the statins if absolutely necessary.  Not "on protocol after any heart operation", as is commonly practiced by the medical community.

In short, I asked them point blank if my heart problems had been caused by cholesterol at all, since my cholesterol readings before the operation were not in any danger zones, nor are they now, nearly 3 years later.  They point blank said "No."  They wanted me on them "just in case - we don't want further heart problems in the future."

You said, "You may know what feels right for you but are you in a position to prescribe for chris51153?  I think not."  And you're right.  I am not in that position.  I simply want Chris to have all the options presently available.   Without this site and others like it, like the FDA's new warnings about statins posted on their website, I would have blythely gone along with the program of being on statins for the rest of my life, possibly only knowing in 5-10 years the permanent damage they may have done, and at that point irrevocably.  (According to the people here, the damage they WOULD have done.)

And I still have not seen any stats on how high the percentage is, of instances of future heart problems if you DON'T take the prescribed statins.  Before and after.  With and without.  The law says, "How were you damaged?"  Medical science should be saying, "How will you be helped, and how will you be damaged?  Here are the statistics for if you do take the meds - in this case the statins - and here are the stats for if you don't."  (If the stats for recurrence of heart problems are low and the risk of damage high...)  I have seen them be concerned, like in the case of my Hodgkins Disease, about an increase from 2.5% to 3.2% of future heart problems due to the radiation treatments later in life.  That was behind a special study I was asked to participate in at Stanford - where I was treated for the Hodgkins Disease - several years after having been treated.  It involved a stress test - an EKG taken while on an ever-escalating-speed treadmill.  Of which several have been prescribed in my case recently - one before the operation (which was halted early on by my cardiologist because of my reactions), and several since the operation, which fortunately I passed with flying colors. 

All of us deserve those stats, on this issue.  I am hoping a reader here will have them and share them with us.