Does This Common Drug Speed up Aging?

Dear Natural Health Solutions Reader,

There is a particular type of prescription drug that is very popular today — found in millions of medicine cabinets across the U.S.

Some physicians have suggested these drugs are so safe and effective we should be able to get them over the counter — or even, like fluoride, from our drinking water.

What am I referring to?

Statins.

These are commonly prescribed to lower cholesterol.

They’re also among the top prescription drugs used in America.

But before we all beg our congresspeople to approve sending us our daily dose of atorvastatin (brand name: Lipitor) or pravastatin (brand names: Pravachol or Selektine) via the kitchen tap, consider this sobering news.

Statin drugs, according to new, frightening research, appear to make regular users become biologically older at an accelerated rate.¹

In other words, evidence suggests that they speed up both the physical and mental declines that typically go along with aging.

How?

The research, just published by scientists at Louisiana’s Tulane University, suggests that statin drugs seriously screw up the activity of stem cells.

These are the “master cells” that give rise to specialized cells throughout the body, such as those in the blood, heart, bones, skin, muscles, nerves, and brain.

The body needs these not only when it is growing, but also to replace cells in the adult body that naturally die every minute of the day.

Consider…

To work properly, stem cells must be able to do two things:

• Differentiate — change into the kind of cells the body requires

• Proliferate — multiply to fill the body’s needs at any given time.

When stem cells can’t do one or both of these as they should, the result is memory loss, muscle pain, diabetes, cataracts, liver dysfunction, diabetes, and/or fatigue.

Sound familiar? It should.

Loss of stem cell function is a hallmark of aging.

After treating stem cells with statins in a laboratory, here’s what the Tulane researchers concluded (in this text, “MSCs” refers to mesenchymal stem cells, an important type of stem cell found in bone marrow that can turn into bone, cartilage, and muscle):

“We have previously shown that aging and chronic metabolic diseases such as diabetes reduce the differentiation and proliferation potential of MSCs… The novel results of this study indicate that statins impair the differentiation potential of MSCs in a similar fashion to the process of aging and diabetes.”

Which means:

“In light of our findings, it is important to critically balance a possible benefit of statin therapy against the less favorable negative effects of statins.”

Exactly.

So what do you do if your LDL cholesterol is elevated and your physician is eager to start you on a statin?

This is a big subject, but consider that statins have an absolutely dismal record when it comes to actually reducing death. Before you buy into the popular notion that these are “miracle drugs,” read Jasmine LeMaster’s cleareyed view of how ineffective these pharmaceuticals really are.

Also, there are effective, simple, cheap lifestyle changes you can make to lower your risk of cardiovascular disease. The two major ones are:

1. Eat a diet low in carbohydrates (especially from grains) and high in nutrient-dense organic vegetables.² Such a diet should include healthy animal fats and protein, such as grass-fed beef and pastured eggs. Wild-caught fish is also a good choice.³

2. Exercise daily, but moderately. Walking a total of 150 minutes per week has been shown to be cardio-protective.⁴

Bottom line: We are all getting older by the day. The last thing you or I need is an expensive drug that may be accelerating this process.

Having extensively reviewed the evidence for and against statins for more than a decade, in my view, the only people who should even consider taking them are middle-aged men who have already been diagnosed with heart disease (even then, it’s a close call).

So if you are taking a statin or have just been prescribed one, have a long discussion about the pros and cons with your physician.

And if he or she blithely dismisses concerns like the ones raised in this article, get another physician.

Brad Lemley
Editor, Natural Health Solutions

Citations

1. Reza Izadpanah, Deborah J. Schächtele, Andreas B Pfnür, Dong Lin, Douglas P. Slakey, Philip J. Kadowitz, Eckhard U. Alt. The Impact of Statins on Biological Characteristics of Stem Cells Provides a Novel Explanation for Their Pleotropic Beneficial and Adverse Clinical Effects. American Journal of Physiology – Cell Physiology. Jul 2015.
2. T. Hu, L.A. Bazzano. The low-carbohydrate diet and cardiovascular risk factors: Evidence from epidemiologic studies. Nutrition, Metabolism and Cardiovascular Diseases. Online January 2, 2014
3. Raatz SK, Silverstein JT, Jahns L, Picklo MJ. Issues of Fish Consumption for Cardiovascular Disease Risk Reduction. Nutrients. 2013.
4. Murtagh EM, Murphy MH, Boone-Heinonen J. Walking – the first steps in cardiovascular disease prevention. Current opinion in cardiology. 2010.