OT : Anyone taking Crestor for cholesterol?

My physician prescribed Crestor 5mg for cholesterol.
Some of the side effects are sore muscles (also damaged
muscles) and kidney trouble.
With a low dosage of only 5mg, should I worry?
My 'bad' cholesterol is 5.7

There may be an alternative. Study up on, and ask your doctor about red yeast rice to see if its right for you

My Dr. just put me on 20mg. I too am a bit weary of the side effects.

Make sure your Dr. does regular liver tests to make sure you are tolerating the drug.

I dont know much yet myself but I am studying up the best I can.

I made a mistake......and let my doctor talk me into taking "Antera".....a cholesterol and triglyceride reducing drug.

For about a year, I didn't notice any side effects......but, then, I began hurting in my achilles tendons....so much so that I could hardly walk when I got out of bed...and it hurt when I got up from my desk at the office. I didn't connect the pain with Antera.

A little while later, my right hand developed tenosynovitis....and hurt so much that I couldn't do very much work with it.

After I got the diagnosis on my right hand, I started checking the internet for side effects of Antera for a possible connection....and lo-and-behold....there it was: "muscle pain, inflamed tendon sheaths", etc. I quit Antera...and it took 6-months for me to heal up where I didn't hurt.

So, here's the bottom line for me.......it'll be a cold day in hell before I take any similar drugs that warn of nasty side effects like what I experienced......and anything else that might cause liver problems. I learned my lesson.

One more thing......everyone needs to know that the pharmacies sell information about which doctors prescribe which drugs....the drug manufacturers purchase this information from an information collecting company ....and relay it to the drug reps....the "pill pushers" who reward the doctors with regular catered lunches for the clinic staffs.....and other regular pay-offs that are hard to trace. The doctor that pushes more Antera or Crestor or whatever......gets bigger freebies from their drug reps....courtesy of the drug manufacturers. That's how it really works.

Gerald

I have been taking Crestor 10 mg for some time with no side effects. Most cholesterol lowering drugs have the same side effects. I had taken Lipitor and Zetia and my liver function labs were high. With the Crestor my labs have been good. Some people can lower their cholesterol with diet and exercise. When I was first Dx'd with high cholesterol, I tried to lower it with diet, exercise and using fish oil, flax seed oil and red yeast rice. 6 months later when I went back to have my level checked it was higher than the 1st time. I do have a family hx of high cholesterol, so it's in my genes. As for not taking any cholesterol lowing drugs D/T side effects, I guess you have to weigh the risks of having high cholesterol. Good luck.

I been taking Crestor and Zetia for a couple of years now, so far I been ok, My sisters heart Dr. took her and all his patients off of Zetia he told her it's killing people, I asked my heart Dr. and he told me he never heard of anything like that.

my mom is taking crestor for a few years now she's 79 and was on zetia it was $74 a month so the doc switched her to lipofen 150mg i guess it's been reintroduced with new packaging,but they also said watch for bad muscle aches as a side effect and discontinue if it's a problem

More than half of the people having cardiovascular events (attacks, strokes, etc) have normal or below cholesterol levels. There is not a single study that shows that high cholesterol CAUSES these events. This theory has been around for a long time and has yet to verified in double-blind placebo-controlled studies; all so-called "evidence" comes from observational studies (where people report what they ate over many yrs...yeah, like that's accurate) which are useless collections of questionable statistics.

The fight against healthy, natural saturated fats began in the '50s with Ancel Keys who was in the pay of the veggie & seed oil interests...they were losing the US Navy market in varnish-based paints to the new petroleum-based pains and needed a new market for veggie & seed oils. So they decided to go into selling this as food; first, they tried selling for wt loss in livestock and humans but that backfired as animals and people got fat consuming all those omega 6 EFAs. Good old Ancel tried to prove that natural fats caused problems...he hydrogenated a common commercial fat of the '50s, our yummy friend coconut oil against unhydrogenated veggie+seed oils -- hydrogenating oils turns them into a chemical poison so the study results were skewed before the 'study' began. When native peoples around the world with no CVD abandon tradtional fats for cheap veggie fats, they develop CVD just like us -- when we learn to question big pharma?

The only ones who benefit from lowered cholesterol are men under 65 who've had a heart attack. No study has shown any benefit to any woman of any age; furthermore, senior women with the highest cholesterol levels have the longest survival rates.

If your cholestesterol goes below 160, you are entering the stoke zone where risk of stroke increases dramatically.

Cholesterol is the foundation for the body's major hormones...too little cholesterol and you can't produce normal levels of hormones. The body also uses cholesterol as a 'bandaid' in the blood vessels which have been damaged because the collagen was not optimal; according to Linus Salk (yes, he of the Salk dead vaccine against polio, that Salk), we and guinea pigs of all animals have lost the ability to produce our own vitamin C and thus are chronically deficient to one extent or another and have collagen that is weak, susceptible to damage. He advocated supplementing with vitamin C, Proline, and Lysine (the latter two are amino acids) because these are needed by the body to create healthy-strong collagen; they also help dissolve established plaque (which BTW consists mostly of veggie+seed oils) in the blood vessels -- it's a 1-2 punch against plaque, healthy collagen doesn't need the cholesterol bandaid to protect the inner lining of the blood vessel as the collagen is strong enough to resist getting damaged (from oxidized LDL cholesterol, stress) and helps safely dissolve existing plaque.

Go investigate...type "cholesterol skeptic" into google and read. Big pharma wants all of us on it's drugs regardless of the damages to our long-term help. Educating yourself and your doctor(s) is your only defense because they own our legislators.

PS: Statins are anti-inflammatories BUT so are aspirin, ginger, tumeric (spice that makes curry yellow, almost tasteless), onions (leeks, scallions), garlic, and other natural substances. Are the horrific side effects of statins worth the benefit of its anti-inflammory effect? Personally, in the near future, I think we're gonna discover the only benefit of statins are as anti-inflammatories because inflammation is the root of almost all of what we call the degenerative diseases. Oh, and apnea increases inflammation, sometimes dramatically -- anyone seen increased CRP levels when they were diagnosed with apnea?

Muse-Inc wrote:Are the horrific side effects of statins worth the benefit of its anti-inflammory effect

OH, ! MY WORD ! ! !
I already take Ezetrol (no side effects what I know of) BUT my system can't tolerate statins.
So doctor decided to keep me on Ezetrol and a low dosage of 5mg, Crestor (statin).

I'm sorry, call me hardheaded, but I'm NOT going to take that Crestor.
We bought a HealthWalker and we both practise twice a day.
No more desserts, chocs, cheese, etc.

I'm going to try and lower the bad cholesterol
naturally.

You guys must just see how sick my husband is!
He is a RA sufferer and takes ALOT of pills.
It is killing him. That's what all the pharmacists
also tell him. He never, never feels O.K.
I'm NOT going that route.

THANK YOU very much you all for the information.

Marietjie,

Check into PANTETHINE (not pantothenic acid, although they are related).

Pantethine is available as a dietary supplement because of evidence of its health benefits. In multiple clinical trials of patients with elevated cholesterol and triglycerides, total and LDL cholesterol were decreased by 12%, triglycerides decreased by 18%, and HDL cholesterol was increased by 9%. These clinical trials were conducted with daily intakes ranging from 600 to 1200 mg/day. Within this dose range there is no evidence of a dose-effect relationship, i.e. changes in lipid concentrations overlapped across the range of doses. Direct dose-response evidence is not available because no trial tested more than one dose. A few trials tested 300 mg/day [1] with more modest but still statistically significant results.

Muse-Inc........

Very nice post......my compliments.

Gerald

Muse-Inc wrote: The body also uses cholesterol as a 'bandaid' in the blood vessels which have been damaged because the collagen was not optimal; according to Linus Salk (yes, he of the Salk dead vaccine against polio, that Salk), we and guinea pigs of all animals have lost the ability to produce our own vitamin C and thus are chronically deficient to one extent or another and have collagen that is weak, susceptible to damage. He advocated supplementing with vitamin C, Proline, and Lysine (the latter two are amino acids) because these are needed by the body to create healthy-strong collagen; they also help dissolve established plaque (which BTW consists mostly of veggie+seed oils) in the blood vessels -- it's a 1-2 punch against plaque, healthy collagen doesn't need the cholesterol bandaid to protect the inner lining of the blood vessel as the collagen is strong enough to resist getting damaged (from oxidized LDL cholesterol, stress) and helps safely dissolve existing plaque.

Did you mean to type nobel-prize winner Linus Pauling?

Billy6 wrote:There may be an alternative. Study up on, and ask your doctor about red yeast rice to see if its right for you

The reason that red yeast rice works is that it contains a compound called "monacolin K". Extract that compound and put it into a pill, and you have "lovastatin", a pharmaceutical drug in the same class as Crestor and Lipitor. When you buy the drug lovastatin, you are getting a known dose of the drug. With red yeast rice, the quantity of monacolin K varies from brand-to-brand and from bottle-to-bottle, a definite disadvantage. Incidentally, if you are taking red yeast rice you need to have your liver enzymes monitored soon after starting and periodically thereafter, just as if you were taking a statin drug.

I normalized my lipid panel in less than 3 months by eliminating pretty much all carbs out of the diet. Go paleolithic ... meats (leaner varieties if you are overweight), nuts, berries, and green and colorful veggies will normalize your cholesterol in no time at all. Chocolate is fine if you eat it with 70% or more cocoa (to minimize sugar content). Cheese is ok in moderation (stick to the hard cheeses). Drinking full fat milk in moderation is ok too (the reason for modertating your saturated fat intake is more for controlling calories rather than cholesterol). Re-read muses post ... very accurate info.

The saying "you are what you eat" rings very true ... cleaning up you diet goes a long way to cleaning up your health.

I'm beginning to think it's weight loss rather than fat intake that helps cholesterol. (Although I know there's that genetic factor for a lot of people, too.) Now, this is only one person, but my friend's husband lost 50 pounds on a low-carb diet, not watching his fat intake at all, really, and his cholesterol went down by a good bit. And he wasn't exercising very much because of some mobility issues he has. I was shocked, since I still have that long-ingrained saturated-fat-equals-high-cholesterol thing going on in my head. Unfortunately, I have a much easier time lowing my fat than I do my carbs!

Great post, Muse-Inc.

Oh, high doses of the RIGHT niacin (not niacinamide) can help cholesterol (you can actually get this in a prescription), but it's not without possible side effects either (what is, really), as does red yeast rice. But you still need to have your liver checked on occasion with these, too.

Pam