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Do I really need statins?

Posted , 11 users are following.

Roverr
Roverr

I am a healthy 49 yrs. old man and usually very active. I do not take any medicines besides Ramipril (Tritace) due to my high blood pressure. Unfortunately for many years I have rather high cholesterol level – 6.1 mmol/l total, 1.2 HDL and my doctor wants to put me on statins.

I am not a physician, but I have been working with information for many years so I did my homework and now I am absolutely confused!

The fact is that I have used many online cardiovascular risk calculators and I found a few rather odd things:

1. I have a probability of developing cardiovascular disease in next 10 years between 8.0 and 10 % despite my with high level of cholesterol. I can not explain this!

2. I was playing with the risk calculators putting different numbers and I have found, that even extremely high cholesterol level like 7 mmol/l just slightly increases the overall risk to 11% in next 10 years I can not explain this!

3. The most interesting thing is that even if I would manage to reduce my cholesterol numbers with statins to recommend level, my cardiovascular risk reduce very slightly!

So I have to take statins during very long period of time just in order to reduce the risk up to 7-8% instead of 8-11! Could you help me to understand where I am wrong?

One of the risk calculators I used was created by The University of Edinburgh - http://cvrisk.mvm.ed.ac.uk/calculator/calc.asp

1 like, 16 replies

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  • Tafia43
    Tafia43 Roverr

    Posted

    Thanks for the link to the risk factor site. Most useful.

    From what I have read, over age 50 a higher level can be protective in males.

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