What is the best statin to take?

Statins lower cholesterol levels through inhibition of HMG-CoA reductase. The synthetic and natural statins have essentially equivalent efficacy at improving the lipid profile. However, in patients who do not achieve their LDL goals, atorvastatin and simvastatin may be the best choices for initial therapy.

What is the safest most effective statin drug?

Which cholesterol-lowering drug is the safest? Overall, statins are safe as a class of drugs. Serious adverse events are very rare. Among the individual medications, studies have shown that simvastatin (Zocor^®) and pravastatin (Pravachol^®) seem to be safer and better tolerated than the other statins.

What is the most effective statin to take?

Rosuvastatin and atorvastatin are the best at lowering LDL cholesterol.

Which statin drug is best tolerated?

According to a research review people who take simvastatin (Zocor) or pravastatin (Pravachol) may experience fewer side effects.

What is the first drug of choice for cholesterol?

Statins are the most common medicine for high cholesterol. They reduce the amount of cholesterol your body makes. You take a tablet once a day. You usually need to take them for life.

Mayo Clinic Minute: Should You Take Statins?

What is the new cholesterol drug that is not a statin?

In studies, Nexletol also appears to reduce the risk of muscle pain, a common complaint of people on statins. Nexletol (bempedoic acid) is a new cholesterol-lowering drug.

Which statin is safest for liver?

It turns out that some statins may be better at preventing liver cancer than others. Specifically, lipophilic statins (those that dissolve more readily in lipids such as oils and fats) may be more effective for preventing liver cancer than hydrophilic statins (those that dissolve more readily in water).

Which statin affects the liver the most?

Atorvastatin is the most common cause of clinically significant liver injury among statins with a reported incidence of 1/17 000 users.

What is the most widely prescribed statin?

Most popular prescriptions. Atorvastatin (Lipitor) is a statin used to treat high cholesterol.

Which statin is least likely to cause muscle weakness?

Is muscle pain a side effect of all statins? Even though all statins are similar chemically, they have some minor differences that could impact how likely they are to cause muscle pain. Simvastatin is the most likely to cause muscle pain, and fluvastatin is the least likely.

Which is safer Lipitor or Crestor?

Despite this, there was no significant difference between the two drugs in how well they decreased the volume of atherosclerotic buildup in the arteries. Both Crestor and Lipitor are generally well tolerated with a similar rate of side effects.

Which statin lowers LDL the most?

Similarly, data from comparative trials, shown in Table 1 confirm that rosuvastatin is the most effective statin for lowering LDL-C (reduction of 63% with 40 mg daily), followed by atorvastatin, simvastatin, and pravastatin. The lipid lowering effect of pitavastatin was comparable to atorvastatin.

What is the lowest statin you can take?

For the purposes of this definition, the lowest daily starting doses of statins are proposed as rosuvastatin 5 mg, atorvastatin 10 mg, simvastatin 20 mg, lovastatin 20 mg, pravastatin 40 mg, fluvastatin 40 mg, and pitavastatin 2 mg.

Can you get off statins once you start?

If you're taking a statin medication to lower your cholesterol, you will need to keep taking your prescription, or your cholesterol will likely go back up. Stopping your statin can put you at risk of having heart disease and other preventable health problems like stroke and heart attack from high cholesterol.

Is there a better statin than Lipitor?

They looked at the effects of Lipitor, Crestor, Zocor, and Pravachol on lowering LDL (low-density lipoprotein) cholesterol after six weeks. The study concluded that Crestor lowered LDL cholesterol by 8.2% more than Lipitor, and Crestor lowered total cholesterol significantly more than all the other statins studied.

Is there a downside to taking statins?

While statins are highly effective and safe for most people, they have been linked to muscle pain, digestive problems and mental fuzziness in some people who take them and may rarely cause liver damage.

How do I choose a statin?

Why do statins have to be taken at night?

So, why do people take statins at night? Many statins work more effectively when they are taken at night. This is because the enzyme which makes the cholesterol is more active at night. Also, the half-life, or the amount of time it takes for half the dose to leave your body, of some statins is short.

Is there a new drug to replace statins?

PCSK-9 inhibitors thus reduce cholesterol levels by maintaining higher levels of LDL receptors that remove cholesterol from the blood. Currently, PCSK-9 inhibitors are limited in use as they must be administered as shots. Further research into them could expand their use as an alternative to statins.

How long does it take for statins to damage liver?

Statin-associated hepatocellular injury frequently occurs 5 to 90 days after the initiation of therapy. Bilirubin levels more than twice the ULN imply severe hepatocellular liver injury with a mortality of 10% and an incidence of 0.7–1.3 per 100,000 cases of drug-induced liver injury (DILI).

Are statins worth the risk?

If you have high cholesterol and are at high risk for cardiovascular disease, you should consider statins. That's because the benefits of statins greatly outweigh the risks. Statins reduce the risk of serious cardiovascular events like heart attack or stroke by up to 25%, and death by 10%.

Are statins hard on the kidneys?

In conclusion, statin use is associated with increased incidence of acute and chronic kidney disease. These findings are cautionary and suggest that long-term effects of statins in real-life patients may differ from shorter term effects in selected clinical trial populations.

How often should you have a blood test when on statins?

Before you start taking statins, your doctor should carry out a blood test to ensure your liver is in a relatively good condition. You should also have a routine blood test to check the health of your liver 3 months after treatment begins, and undergo another after 12 months.

Which statin affects the liver the least?

Simvastatin, lovastatin, fluvastatin, and atorvastatin are metabolized by cytochrome P-450, while pravastatin, rosuvastatin, and pitavastatin remain almost unaffected by any hepatic metabolic processes.

Can statins reverse fatty liver?

There are no specific treatments for NAFLD, but cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins appear to slow its progression to more serious liver inflammation and fibrosis/scarring, characteristics of NASH.