Do Statins Sap Your Energy?

Repeat after me:  all medications have side effects (some idiosyncratic).  All herbs have side effects (not all known).  All dietary supplements, even those labeled natural & organic, have side effects (especially from unlabeled ingredients or contaminants).  The point is that before taking any thing, you need to know what you're taking, what's its potential for doing good vs risk of harm.

Along those lines, statins have a lot to offer.  They lower cholesterol and reduce heart attack risk in those with known heart disease (secondary (2o) prevention).  There's even a hint that they can reduce risk in those w/o known disease (primary (1o) prevention).  But it's in this latter group where the margin of error is less since the ratio of benefit:side effect is smaller.  In other words, if you don't have known heart disease, your tolerance for side effects is going to be lower than if you had known disease.

When it comes to statins, we've known about its penchant for irritating the liver and muscles for quite some time.  More recently, the Food & Drug Administration revised labeling, pointing out that statins may be linked to cognitive impairment and to dysglycemia, a euphemism for raising one's sugar level.

Well, I'm not one to kick a person when he's down (unlike mixed martial arts!), but statins took another beating earlier this week in the form of a research letter published in the Archives of Internal Medicine in which the authors concluded that use of statins was associated with adverse effects on energy & fatigue with exertion, especially in women in this double-blind, placebo-controlled study of 1,016 participants randomized to simvastatin 20mg vs pravastatin 40mg vs placebo for 6 months.

The authors declared this study the first of its kind, lending credence to scattered case reports of similar nature.  It would be helpful to see if these results can be replicated by others.  More importantly, given the push to towards use of statins in primary prevention, we need to be sure that benefit exceeds risk.

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