The Important of Meditation

When Your Doctor Orders Cholesterol-Lowering Medications


You’ve just left your doctor’s office with a prescription for a statin medication to help lower your cholesterol. But you may be nervous. You’ve heard that you’ll have to take this cholesterol-lowering medication for the rest of your life. And your doctor noted that statins, like all medicine, can cause side effects.

Why should you take a statin? Can’t you just improve your cholesterol levels by eating right and exercising? The answer is yes -- and no. Healthy cholesterol and triglyceride levels look like this:

Total cholesterol: less than 200 mg/dL

HDL (“good” cholesterol): 40 mg/dL or more for men, 50 or more for women

LDL (“bad” cholesterol): less than 130 mg/dL

Triglycerides: less than 150 mg/dL

Many people can get their cholesterol and triglyceride levels into these healthy ranges through a combination of a healthy diet and an active lifestyle. But for many others, these lifestyle changes help, but are not enough.
Measuring the Benefits of Statins, Diet, and Exercise

“Lifestyle changes certainly are the cornerstone of cholesterol reduction,” says Michael Miller, MD, director of the Center for Preventive Cardiology at the University of Maryland Medical Center.

Exercising, eating a healthy diet, and losing weight can result in:
A 5% to 10% reduction in LDL cholesterol
A 10% to 30% reduction in triglycerides

But for those with very high LDL cholesterol or triglycerides, those lifestyle measures may be insufficient. “If your lipid levels are way out of whack, for example, reducing your LDL by 10% may not get you down to a healthy level,” Miller says.
Statin medications act quickly and can help reduce LDL or “bad” cholesterol by up to 50% or more.
Statins also help increase HDL or “good” cholesterol by up to 15%.

If you’re making healthy lifestyle changes at the same time, says Miller, you should see major changes in your cholesterol levels within two to four weeks after beginning lipid-lowering therapy.

“Statins are very simple: you take them once a day, and their effects are quite profound,” says Patrick McBride, MD, MPH, director of the preventive cardiology program and the cholesterol clinic at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

“Not only do statins improve your cholesterol levels, but they reduce your risk of heart attack, stroke, and cardiovascular events. They’re one of the great success stories of modern medicine,” says McBride.

Most recently, the JUPITER trial showed that statins can also slash the risk of heart attack nearly in half for people with normal cholesterol but high levels of a protein associated with inflammation.
Statin Side Effects and Other Worries

What about side effects from taking statins? It’s true that any medication comes with side effects. Side effects most commonly seen with statins are headache, GI tract upset, muscle and joint aches, or rash. Very rarely, patients may experience muscle or liver damage.