Would you take a potentially life-saving medication if muscle pain, fatigue and other serious side effects got in the way of your daily life?
Doctors often prescribe statins to patients with high cholesterol levels. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released in December 2015 says 36.7 percent of U.S. adults (78.1 million people age 21 or older) either take a statin or are eligible for the cholesterol-lowering drug.
Unfortunately, not everyone prescribed a statin medication tolerates it well.
Of the almost 40 million people who do take statins, approximately 1 out of every 8 patients (about 5 million people) suffer from “statin myalgia — a condition which causes unrelenting pain, aches, fatigue, and other muscle symptoms”, according to Ken Colley, M.D., CEO of AquaRa Nutraceuticals. His company developed Statin-Ease®, a nutritional supplement designed to combat these side effects.
What are statins?
You might recognize statin medications such as Crestor (rosuvastatin), Lipitor (atorvastatin) and Zocor (simvastatin) from a variety of print and TV advertisements. These medications, when taken daily and usually over a long time period, help lower total cholesterol numbers. Lowering blood cholesterol leads to a reduced risk of stroke and heart attack. Statins success rate makes them among the most popular prescriptions given by doctors.
The downside of success
While yielding positive results for lowering cholesterol, statins present numerous problems for patients. The Mayo Clinic lists a number of common patient complaints and adverse side effects while using statins:
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Muscle pain and damage. Reported incidents range from mild discomfort to pain severe enough to impact daily activities such as walking and climbing stairs. Mild to moderate muscle pain, called myalgia, is fairly common, and occurs in as many as 20 percent of those taking statins. Extreme cases of muscle damage, known as rhabdomyolysis (rab-doe-mi-OL-ih-sis) can cause severe muscle pain, kidney failure and death. This extreme condition, although exceedingly rare (less than half of 1 percent of statin users), can occur if someone takes statins in combination with certain drugs or if they take a high dose of statins.
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Liver damage. Taking statins can sometimes raise liver enzymes responsible for digesting food, drinks and medications. Doctors allow for small enzyme level increases. If enzyme numbers spike, though, doctors may switch medications.
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Type 2 diabetes (increased blood sugar). People taking statins could experience higher blood glucose levels, which may lead to type 2 diabetes. While the risk is small, the FDA issued a warning on statins labels about it.
These serious side effects push many people away from either starting these medications or even discontinuing a prescribed course of treatment. When patients suddenly stop taking statins, blood pressure and cholesterol issues can quickly return, boosting their risk for stroke and heart attack.
A natural solution
For patients who need to stay on their statin therapy, but want to reduce the negative side effects, Statin-Ease® offers a natural solution to their physical problems.
AquaRa Nutraceuticals, based in San Francisco, CA, developed Statin-Ease® as a companion supplement for patients who need to continue their medication, but want to maintain a healthy, active lifestyle.
“Sometimes one does indeed need potent drugs; however, many times a gentler, natural and more nutritional based approach will do the trick - less expensively, and more safely and more naturally for one's body,” explained Colley.
According to the Statin-Ease® website, scientific studies show statins can reduce a variety of nutrients in our bodies, including CoEnzyme Q10 (CoQ10), which boost cell productivity in the heart and skeletal muscles. Statin-Ease® combines the needed dose level of CoQ10 with an adequate ratio of other nutrients such as vitamin D (promotes organ growth), vitamin B12 (keeps nerve and red blood cells healthy and helps reduce fatigue), magnesium (maintains blood pressure, heart rhythm and nerve function) to work together against statins’ side effects.
Convenient and safe
Before Colley developed Statin-Ease®, he recommended a combination of these vitamins and supplements to his patients to ease their side effects. Still, Colley noted a challenge.
“After a while it was tricky for these folks to remember,” Colley said. “Of the six nutra-ingredients, and especially the three key ingredients for alleviating statin myalgia, were they to be taken as ‘four of these capsules, two of those and three of these’ or ’two of these, four of those and six of those’ every morning, not to mention the strengths of each those capsules that you can buy at Vitamin Shoppe/Walgreens etc. Was it 50 mg? 100 mg, 200 mg size? So that's where our second big advantage comes in: convenience. This was my next inspiration, for the actual product form. That was the birth of our stickpack version of Statin-Ease®. Who wants to swallow a handful of horse pills everyday anyway?”
Statin-Ease® is a convenient single-dose powder packet that you simply mix into water to get your several hundred mg of nutras-ingredients all in one good tasting beverage. Statin-Ease® should accompany the doctor-prescribed daily dose of statins. It can be mixed into 8- to 16-ounces of water in a bottle or glass and taken either with or without food. This convenience makes Statin-Ease® a natural addition to any daily routine.
Statin-Ease® is made in the USA and has a Good Manufacturing Practice endorsement (GMP), which, according to the Food and Drug Administration website, “assures the proper design, monitoring and control of manufacturing processes and facilities”, which helps identify, strengthen, and maintain the quality and purity of drug products.
To get more information on how Statin-Ease® works, or ask questions of Dr. Colley, visit the official website.
