Drug Test May Not Tell the Whole Statin Story

By Rachel Stockton

According to the National Institutes of Health, 1 in 1000 people taking statins , such as Lipitor and Crestor, experience muscle aches and pains as a result. Most of the time, these symptoms go away. On rare occasions, patients can experience muscle myopathy, or muscle damage. In rarer cases still, this type of damage can lead to a deadly muscular condition called rhabdomyolysis. This disease, due to an actual breakdown of muscle tissue, can lead to renal failure. In 2001, Baycor was taken off the market because 31 people died from the disease (New York Times).

Typically, doctors keep an eye on patients who develop muscular pain and test them for fiber damage with a blood test designed to determine if the patient has circulating creatine phosphokinase (CPK), a specific protein that is a marker for inflammation. In a study led by Tufts University and the University of Bern in Switzerland, researchers found that some patients can sustain microscopic muscle damage even if their CPK levels are not elevated.

Specifically, 25 out of 44 patients who had muscle pain also had muscle injury, in spite of normal CPK tests. The bottom line, according to researchers, is that while CPK testing can confirm that a patient is suffering from muscle damage, it cannot fully rule it out.  

In 2008, the New York Times reported that statin drugs are the biggest selling medications in the world. That same year, a report on a Harvard study appeared to show that 50 year old men and 60 year old women who don’t have high cholesterol could actually benefit from taking statins as a precautionary measure. Critics of the findings stated that the emphasis should be on lifestyle and behavioral changes as a way of lowering cholesterol risk, not on the biological effects of statin drugs.