Documentary $TATIN NATION: The Great Cholesterol Cover-Up (Full Movie)

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I love statins!

I take rosuvastatin personally, but atorvastatin looks pretty good as well.

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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:

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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 :slightly_smiling_face:

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.

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Reducing LDL is not enough. Reducing LDL to levels where plaque no longer forms or even reverses over longer periods of time is enough.

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