Flax Seed: A Natural Alternative to Statins?

Earlier this month, headlines around the world heralded a large clinical trial dubbed JUPITER funded by Crestor maker Astrazeneca. The findings from JUPITER suggested that healthy older adults with low "bad cholesterol" levels but elevated inflammation markers could lower their risk of heart disease by 44 percent through a daily dose of statin drugs.

Few news outlets, however, added the necessary caveats. Beyond the billions in additional health care costs associated with expanding the pool of statin users to include those with normal LDL cholesterol levels for example, the net reduction in absolute risk for a major cardiovascular event was less than one percent (1.8 percent of those on a placebo suffered a "hard" cardiac event such as a heart attack, stroke or cardiovascular death during the nearly two-year-long study compared with 0.9 percent taking a statin). On the other hand, the absolute risk of diabetes increased among those taking the drug, from 2.4 percent to 3.0 percent. Other studies have cited muscle pain and weakness in 1 to 5 percent of patients as a potential side-effect of the cholesterol-blocking mechanism.

And that's not all. Clinical research has uncovered a number of genetic susceptibilities to statin drugs, including statin-induced rhabdomyolysis, which results in severe muscle damage accompanied by toxic effects on organs such as the kidneys. Other side-effects have been well documented among statin users such as blinding headaches and memory loss. For these reasons, many health care providers are justifiably concerned about the increased marketing of statin drugs to include a segment of the pediatric population recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics this summer and presumably now to relatively healthy adults as well. The guidelines issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics called for cholesterol screening of children as young as 2—and cholesterol drugs for kids as young as 8.

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