What Your Doctor May Not Be Telling You About Lipitor
If you are like 98 million Americans over the age of 20, you may have gotten the news at your last check-up that your cholesterol was too high.1 Depending on exactly how high that “too high” figure was, and your doctor’s experience or skill level, your doctor may have urged you to make changes in your diet, find a new form of exercise, or take a pill to help you get that figure down.
And if you are like most Americans, the thought of just taking a pill to counteract high cholesterol sounded like a much more palatable choice than giving up certain foods, losing weight or exercising.
Your doctor may have given you a prescription for Lipitor, the most highly-prescribed drug of its class, or he may simply have handed you some free samples. He probably suggested that you give it a try, and come back in a matter of weeks or months to have your cholesterol checked again.
If you have a really conscientious doctor, he might even have told you to be sure to read the fine-print pamphlet that the pharmacist would be giving you along with your prescription, so that you can evaluate the side effects of Lipitor for yourself.
What he probably didn’t tell you was that once you start taking Lipitor to help you control your cholesterol, you can expect to be taking it for the rest of your life.
What is Lipitor?
Lipitor is a “statin,” a class of drugs that works by blocking the production of a certain enzyme that is necessary for the liver to produce cholesterol. The enzyme (called “hydroxy-methylglutaryl-coenzyme A reductase”) occurs naturally in the body. By inhibiting the production of this enzyme, statins slow down the production of cholesterol. Since too much cholesterol has been linked to arteriosclerosis and heart attack, people at risk for these problems are usually urged to take steps to lower their cholesterol, including taking a statin such as Lipitor.
Does Lipitor work?
It’s unquestionable that Lipitor is very effective in doing what it is designed to do: inhibit an enzyme thereby lowering your blood cholesterol. What isn’t clear is exactly how effective Lipitor is at saving the lives of people taking it.
In 2005, Pfizer, Lipitor’s manufacturer, funded a study of 10,000 patients on Lipitor. They compared high-dose patients to low-dose patients, and were very happy to report that high-dose patients experienced 2.2% fewer repeat cardiovascular incidents (heart attack, stroke) than the low-dose patients.
Pfizer was less excited about the other relevant statistic, however: more of the high-dose patients died during the study than did lose-dose patients.
While only 126 patients in the high-dose group died from cardiovascular causes, 31 more people in that group died from other causes. In the low-dose group, 155 people died from cardiovascular causes, and none from other causes.
Overall, the risk of death was nearly the same with high-dose and lower-dose Lipitor. In other words, high-dose Lipitor offered no advantage in the study’s most important category: preventing deaths.2
What should I ask my doctor about before deciding to take Lipitor?
Well, first of all, it’s expensive. Lipitor is the most costly of the statins currently on the market, and will cost you about $200 for a 30-day low-dose supply, or $235 for the high-dose version.
Additionally, like any drug, Lipitor has side effects or drawbacks as well as benefits. The drug that is lowering your cholesterol may also be lowering your quality of life. Patients report a number of symptoms, from muscle pain to memory loss, and they also say that their symptoms seem to increase the longer that they take statins.
Says one pharmacist, “My husband took statins for about 10 years. During that time his muscles slowly got stiffer, he had vague aches and pains, his memory was suffering and he had decreasing levels of energy. His labs were normal. I thought he was just “aging” and he just needed to do Yoga or stretching.”
When her husband’s dose was increased, however, his symptoms got worse. He stopped taking them, and took 6 months to recover. Says the pharmacist, “Today, statin free, it’s as if he were 15 years younger.” 3
So why I can’t I just quit taking it?
Well, you can, but your doctor is likely to advise strongly against it: if you stop, your cholesterol is likely to rise again. Withdrawal effects from Lipitor could be severe. If you decide to stop, you’ll need to do so gradually, and while being carefully watched by your physician.
Learn everything you can about Lipitor before you start taking it.
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1 American Heart Association, 2011, http://newsroom.heart.org/pr/aha/american-heart-association-urging-214879.aspx.2 “High-Dose Lipitor for Heart Attacks: How Effect, How Safe?,” http://medicationsense.com/articles/may_aug_05/hi_dose_lipitor042405.html
3 http://www.medrants.com/archives/2672