X-Message-Number: 16714 From: Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 14:29:33 EDT Subject: (no subject) Thanks for your input Doug. It is said all highly active drugs go through three phases: 1) The panacea phase; it's miracle, cures everything and can do no harm. 2) The demonization phase; it has terrible side effects, causes more problems than it cures, and is overpriced. 3) Finally, the Perfectly Pedestrian Pharmaceutical Phase wherein physicians and patients adjust to the benefits and shortcomings of the drug in a more or less realistic way. This will probably happen with statins. Perhaps Doug is right that in Canada you have to have an MI before they are prescribed. But this is not the case in US. The current NIH and AHA blood lipid guidelines are all that is needed. If you are not in an HMO or are willing to pay for you own drugs and you show up with the raft of compelling papers from the NEMJ, Stroke, The Lancet, and too many others to name, you'll get a prescription. I did and I got my insurance to pay for it. I wish I could have taken Prevachol, and may try it again; in my case it seems that Captopril is a major driver of the itching when taken with a statin and I've switched back to enalapril. In the meantime, I'll have to be happy with a 50% drop in LDL and a massive improvement in LDL/HDL ratio. I think it is very important to point out that the statins are working by mechanisms other than lowering cholesterol. These drugs are potent antiinflammatories and appear to affect Nf kappa B expression and impact multiple other genes. I suspect their effect in Alzheimer's, if it proves out, will be due to a direct effect on the CNS unrelated to cholesterol and that the same will be true of osteoporosis and Type II diabetes. They were candidates in my mind for use as pretreatment in cerebral resuscitation and I would tentatively recommend that terminal cryonics patients start and continue statin therapy where not contraindicated. The statins appear to be more effective at inhibiting CNS inflammation than my pet drug Dapsone; an antileprosy drug with potent CNS protective effects. They are also less toxic and more available. If I ever to get where I can do research again, I have a good small animal model validated to evaluate these kinds of interventions. John Bull has asked to reprint this article in THE IMMORTALIST. You may want to amplify and add to it and tip in references and come on as a coauthor. I think that intelligent application of these drugs could prolong both the quality and the quantity of a lot of lives. The important thing here is that the statistical base is large, it is in HUMANS and it mostly RCT or very good retrospective studies. It seems clear that for the past decade the statins are really squaring the curve. That's a wonderful piece of luck, because everybody knows that if that were the purpose of the statins they would be in FDA Hell till we were all dead. I'd also caution people that taking supplements has very little comparable evidence that they work, and growing evidence that most don't -- or can even hurt you. I became very suspicious of Vitamin C about 10 years ago and cut it out of the cryonics protocols. Every ischemic animal that got ascorbate had markedly greater injury after ischemia -- usually not recovering any level of consciousness even with less than 10 minutes of insult time. Recently the Aerospace study on carotid artery intimal thickening in people supplementing with ascorbate, and the recent in vivo studies showing increased radical production and mutation seem to bear out our earlier experience. Perhaps if supplementation is more aggressive with other antioxidants this negative effect could be avoided. However, until this is demonstrated I'd hold C intake to no more than 250 mg/day/adult. It is just too potent a driver of the Fenton reaction and there is plenty of free iron to catalyze this nasty radical cascade. Mike Darwin Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=16714