6. Long-term Statin Therapy Leads to Damage Everywhere

Statins, then, slowly erode the muscle cells over time. After several years have passed, the muscles reach a point where they can no longer keep up with essentially running a marathon day in and day out. The muscles start literally falling apart, and the debris ends up in the kidney, where it can lead to the rare disorder, rhabdomyolysis, which is often fatal. In fact, 31 of our statin reviews contained references to "rhabdomyolysis" as opposed to none in the comparison set. Kidney failure, a frequent consequence of rhabdomyolysis, showed up 26 times among the statin reviews, as opposed to only four times in the control set.

The dying muscles ultimately expose the nerves that innervate them to toxic substances, which then leads to nerve damage such as neuropathy, and, ultimately Amyloid Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, a very rare, debilitating, and ultimately fatal disease which is now on the rise due (I believe) to statin drugs. People diagnosed with ALS rarely live beyond five years. Seventy-seven of our statin reviews contained references to ALS, as against only 7 in the comparison set.

As ion leaks become untenable, cells will begin to replace the potassium/sodium system with a calcium/magnesium based system. These two ions are in the same rows of the periodic table as sodium/potassium, but advanced by one column, which means that they are substantially larger, and therefore it's much harder for them to accidentally leak out. But this results in extensive calcification of artery walls, heart valves, and the heart muscle itself. Calcified heart valves can no longer function properly to prevent backflow, and diastolic heart failure results from increased left ventricular stiffness. Research has shown that statin therapy leads to increased risk to diastolic heart failure (Silver et al., 2004, Weant and Smith, 2005). Heart failure shows up 36 times in our statin drug data as against only 8 times in the comparison group.

Once the muscles can no longer keep up with lactate supply, the liver and heart will be further imperilled. They're now worse off than they were before statins, because the lactate is no longer available, and the LDL, which would have provided fats as a fuel source, is greatly reduced. So they're stuck processing sugar as fuel, something that is now much more perilous than it used to be, because they are depleted in membrane cholesterol. Glucose entry into muscle cells, including the heart muscle, mediated by insulin, is orchestrated to occur at lipid rafts, where cholesterol is highly concentrated. Less membrane cholesterol results in fewer lipid rafts, and this leads to impaired glucose uptake. Indeed, it has been proposed that statins increase the risk to diabetes (Goldstein and Mascitelli, 2010, Hagedorn and Arora, 2010). Our data bear out this notion, with the probability of the observed distributions of diabetes references happening by chance being only 0.006.