Get Your Eight-year Old a Statin, Stat!

I am outraged that pediatricians will now prescribe statin drugs to children as young as eight. When I first read this news, I thought it was a parody of American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines, but I was wrong.

There is no research showing statins will prevent heart disease when our children reach middle age. No research. If there were research, it would take fifty years to conduct it on our kids. And, what would be studied? Heart disease risk, of course, but also the risk of developing severe liver disease, muscle problems, and other side effects from taking decades of statins. If the research doesn't sound ethical, how could it be ethical to start treating our kids without any studies?

Cholesterol is critical for brain function. Does the AAP really think that kids' brains will develop normally by reducing cholesterol in their body?  Remember, they haven't even studied it! Our nerves are surrounded by fatty insulation which serves the same function as plastic insulation around electric wire.

Dr. Ronald Hoffman puts it this way:

Cholesterol is actually essential for the developing brain. The brain is largely composed of cholesterol. Even in adults, a connection has been demonstrated between higher cholesterol--especially HDL--and better brain function. What's bad for the ticker is good for the brain. Children's brains are rapidly growing and forming new nerve connections, and limiting cholesterol, either via an ultra-restrictive low-fat diet or through artificial cholesterol blockade might have unforeseeable effects on brain development.

Significantly, statin drugs also deplete co-enzyme Q10 -- a critical substance our cells need to make energy for our bodies. Do we want our children to become more sloth-like with mitochondrial dysfunction? That's the effect of depleting co-Q10. In fact, mitochondrial dysfunction is the very condition that the CDC said pre-disposed Hannah Poling to regress into autism after receiving a bunch of vaccines. Hannah's family just won that case, which was settled out of Vaccine Court. This ground-breaking case has launched many mitochondria research studies.

Particularly unnerving is that the usefulness of statins in adults has been under increased scrutiny. BusinessWeek boldly ran a story in January with the following headline: Do Cholesterol Drugs Do Any Good? Research suggests that, except among high-risk heart patients, the benefits of statins such as Lipitor are overstated

For that story, BusinessWeek interviewed Dr. James M. Wright who "is no ordinary family physician. A professor at the University of British Columbia, he is also director of the government-funded Therapeutics Initiative, whose purpose is to pore over the data on particular drugs and figure out how well they work." Here is how Dr. Wright characterized his statin and heart disease findings:

[He] had a surprise when he looked at the data for the majority of patients...who don't have heart disease. He found no benefit in people over the age of 65, no matter how much their cholesterol declines, and no benefit in women of any age. He did see a small reduction in the number of heart attacks for middle-aged men taking statins in clinical trials. But even for these men, there was no overall reduction in total deaths or illnesses requiring hospitalization—despite big reductions in "bad" cholesterol. "Most people are taking something with no chance of benefit and a risk of harm."

Prescribing statins to kids makes no sense to me, but it must make 'cents' to Pfizer. Pfizer makes $30 million a year from Lipitor with the current prescribing guidelines. Do they really need to target our kids to make more money?

I say no, not my kids. I'll give them as healthy a diet and lifestyle as possible and (gasp!) take our chances on heart disease. I love my kids more than anything in this world - their health and future is too precious to risk on unproven prescription drugs.

Alix also writes for www.mednauseum.blogspot.com, a blog devoted to research supporting dietary and environmental causes of chronic illness. She is currently writing a book about wind energy.

An original Silicon Valley Moms Blog post.