By Duane Graveline MD, MPH
Statins and Mitochondrial Damage Part 1 of 11
Introduction:
Tens of thousands of statin users have complained to their doctors of weakness, instability, easy fatigue, muscle aches and pains, burning of their extremities, depression, personality change and faulty memory, to which their doctors generally have responded, "You have to expect this now. You are over fifty."
Although these experienced doctors all have pointed to a reasonable presumptive diagnosis, few have been entirely comfortable with this explanation because of a curious recurring pattern in their presentation.
All of these patients have been on statins of one brand or another and the transition from midlife vigor to the multiple infirmities of the elderly has been much too swift in most. In the few months since the previous office visit, an aura of senescence has evolved in these patients. Doctors deal with the passage of time on a daily basis and are acutely sensitive to its telltale first traces. All of us are vulnerable in time.
Somehow the word time seems to suggest a more appropriate meaning and the mind finally jumps to the correct interpretation - premature. The complaints their patients are reporting may be common, even routine, in the elderly yet these people are for the most part in their sixties and seventies, and sometimes even much younger!
If anything out of the ordinary can be attached to these complaints of faulty memory, weakness and various aches and pains, it is their prematurity - premature aging.
Conditions are being complained about that ordinarily would not be seen until much later in life. Are these statin users being robbed of their "golden years"? Is it possible that their passage to senescence has been expedited? If so, what could be the mechanism?
This series will take you on a journey where many really do not want to go - not after decades of use of reductase inhibitor (statin) class of drugs. What doctor wants to admit that he or she has been wrong about this side effect thing that now appears to be much more important than originally thought?
I have been there, and I have done that, and it has not been easy. The very idea that my practice philosophy was wrong for many years is a bitter pill for me to accept, and to think, I was following the dictates of national leadership, marching in lockstep with everyone else to the misguided fallacy of cholesterol causation of arterial damage.
Duane Graveline MD MPH
Former USAF Flight Surgeon
Former NASA Astronaut
Retired Family Doctor
