disease. CoQ 10 is also a fat-soluble antioxidant, and helps to
keep oxidative stress in check. Lowering it with statins
could be bad news for the oxygen- and polyunsaturated fat-
rich brain.^22
DOCTOR’S NOTE: WHY WE’RE WARY OF STATINS
The paradigm under which statins were originally studied,
and for which the strongest data in support of their use
exists, was secondary prevention—preventing a heart attack
after you’ve already had one. The indication for their use
was expanded to primary prevention (preventing a
cardiovascular event in someone who’s never had one)
through drug company–funded studies, essentially labeling
millions of Americans who had never had a heart problem
as now having the “disease” of hypercholesterolemia, or
high cholesterol. But that’s good, right? We are saving lives!
The key concept here, however, is that most of those people
put on a statin for high cholesterol would never have had a
heart attack in the first place. I’ll say that again: the largest
proportion of people who take statins are healthy
individuals. The statin is helping someone, but for each
person it helps, we as physicians have to give it to
potentially hundreds of perfectly healthy people with the
accompanying side effects and no health benefit
whatsoever.
One way we quantify the overall effectiveness of a drug
is the NNT, or “number needed to treat.” To illustrate, let’s