I love statins!
I take rosuvastatin personally, but atorvastatin looks pretty good as well.
Yes - I’ll stick with my statin and I’m looking at PCSK9 and other approaches too… I look to cardiologists for expertise on this type of thing.
European Society of Cardiology:
Statins are wonderful, but they are not enough.
The problem is less the statins than the perception than LDL by itself is enough for a risk assessment.
For instance here is the CVD risk calculator from the same European Society of Cardiology.
Here are my lipid values: LDL 198, TC 302, HDL 95, BP 120
That gives me:
Your 10-year risk of fatal and non-fatal CVD events is : 4.1%
Your risk is similar to a 60 year old person with low risk factors.
My values of 8 years ago before I switched to low carbs and endurance training were much better for the LDL at 106, HDL 59 and TC 196.
So how does that much lower LDL translate into a lower risk:
Your 10-year risk of fatal and non-fatal CVD events is : 4.4%
Your risk is similar to a 60 year old person with low risk factors.
So I had half the LDL and a 0.3% greater risk.
And don’t call me an LDL denialist, this is the official calculator of the European Society of Cardiology!
Now if I reduce the LDL to 70 which is the lowest we can use with that calculator I get:
Your 10-year risk of fatal and non-fatal CVD events is : 4.4%
Clearly the European Society of Cardiology does not think that lower LDL by itself reduces the 10 year CVD risk.
As a fun experiment I reduced my age by 10 years to 50 and my risk is now 2.2% with my current high cholesterol and still higher at 2.4% with my reduced cholesterol.
Clearly it’s much better to try and reduce the risk by getting younger
So my point is yes statins do reduce LDL but reducing LDL is not always better and LDL does not correlate well with CVD risk.
BTW Lp(a) is more of a concern for CVD.
BTW2 too low LDL is also not good for all cause mortality which is another debate.
Reducing LDL is not enough. Reducing LDL to levels where plaque no longer forms or even reverses over longer periods of time is enough.