[martin82]

There is no reason take statins, ever. They will destroy your muscles, then cause diabetes and thus indirectly kill you. They will prevent a heart attack by... four days.

If biomarkers are elevated, the question must always be, "why is this elevated", and "is there a natural change in habit and diet that can reverse this elevation".

Artifically lowering the marker with a drug is like pasting duct tape on a leaking pipe - the leak is still there and it will likely quietly get worse over time and then eventually kill you anyways.

I find it unbelievable that our society swallows any drug without second thought. You body produces cholesterol on purpose. There must be reason why it produces it. "Ah well, who cares, let's just throw in a wrench and make it stop producing the cholesterol" and hope for the best...

[cthalupa]

Arguing against nonsense like this gets so exhausting.

Statins do not destroy your muscles. Newer statins make this already exceedingly rare side effect even rarer, but let's look at them as a general class:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36049498/

Blinded RCT/Meta-analysis shows about 11 complaints per 1k patient years, with 90% of them not actually being due to the statin. But because people act like they're common, they mistakenly believe it was the statin, which just reinforces this idea. And that's for muscle pain.

https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/atv.0000000000000073

https://academic.oup.com/eurjpc/article-abstract/26/5/512/59...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15572716/

For actual significant muscle injury? Even lower. 1 or less per 10,000 patient years.

Effectively, you might get one muscle ache per year per 100 people and at most a 1 in 10,000 chance of serious myotoxicity.

As for diabetes, rosuvstatin usually has a neutral to positive impact on insulin sensitivity, and pitvastatin almost always has a positive impact. Some statins do have negative impact, but it's not universal.

It's not like duct tape on a leaking pipe - it's like removing items in a pipe that damage the pipe walls. Yeah, ideally they're not in the pipe to begin with, but removing them is better than letting them stay, and diet and exercise only do so much to remove said items.

Your body can synthesize LDL de novo in the organs that use it, and one of the heaviest users, the brain, can't get cholesterol out of your diet/serum levels at all - LDL cannot pass the blood brain barrier.

There are people with genetic mutations that mean they don't produce LDL, or at least not at high levels - their increased longevity and incredibly rare incidents of ASCVD is what drove the creation of PKCS9 inhibitors.

Statins also lower LDL-C levels - they don't make your body stop producing cholesterol in general, or even LDL-C. Even if your body couldn't make it on-demand where needed, statins aren't going to drop your serum levels to 0.

[calf]

I feel like statins are harder to accept than vaccines. With vaccines we can say it is just training our existing immune system to recognize and fight something. So how would you straightforwardly explain statins to a scientifically literate adult so they can make an informed decision. But part of that means honestly acknowledging whatever scientific unknowns and uncertainties there are in this area of human biology.