Gyroscopic Investing

Did they mention the part about memory loss associated with statins?

I'm very curious about statins. I know people who take them and are doing well, and those who won't go near them and are doing well.
But, it used to be heavily recommended that certain people take aspirin daily for health, and aren't the experts beginning to backtrack on that one?

Benko wrote: Did they mention the part about memory loss associated with statins?

Or CoQ10 depletion?  Or brain shrinkage?  Or permanent muscle damage?  Frailty?  Or...  won't be much longer before there's the mother of all class action lawsuits.  Just need a couple more years of retired Baby Boomers with "unintended" negative effects to get to a critical mass.

The only real benefit statins have is it reduces inflammation and cancer risk since the HMG-CoA enzyme is used by certain cancers.  But that's not what the marketing fiction is about.

BTW, statins were originally discovered in yeast which is why the dietary supplement Red Yeast Extract is used in place of the synthesized drug versions.  But the safety profile is unlikely to be any better since the supression of HMG-CoA is the same.

dualstow wrote: I'm very curious about statins. I know people who take them and are doing well, and those who won't go near them and are doing well.
But, it used to be heavily recommended that certain people take aspirin daily for health, and aren't the experts beginning to backtrack on that one?

I don't think so.  Aspirin is useful for lowering inflammation in people that are otherwise noncompliant to fixing their diet, lifestyle and supplementing.  It doesn't offer much effect vs array of negative side effects, but its still "better than nothing" as the thinking goes.  This is one of the rare cases where crony capitalism doesn't overinfluence the doctor's recommendation.  The thing about aspirin is it permanentely and irreversibly knocks out the COX-2 enzyme while all other substances just hinder its effect to varying degrees.  It takes about a week for the body to generate new COX-2 (in prescence of no aspirin).

And when COX-2 is knocked out, all the "inflammation flow" for lack of a better terms gets diverted for processing to the 5-LOX enzyme.  That's what the drug Vioxx did and people were dropping dead left and right like flies.

Like statins, aspirin is security theatre -- at least for their intended purposes.  But there are much better ways to reduce inflammation than with these two jokers.

BTW, Big Pharma is really chomping on the bit to get statins expanded out to as many people as possible because of the Patent Cliff and earnings collapse they are facing.  So you got to take the media headlines and funded studies with many grains of salt.

Benko wrote: Did they mention the part about memory loss associated with statins?

I'll bet they "forgot" to mention that.