Most doctors try to solve just about any illness with a pill. They often gloss over the potential side effects. But if you’re taking a statin to lower your cholesterol – you probably already know you’re at risk to suffer a long list of them. Well, unfortunately, you can add one more that has snuck in to steal something very valuable from you.
Your sleep.
A test of the popular statin simvastatin (also called Zocor) shows that this drug can cause sleep disturbances that most doctors may not fully understand.
The problem starts with the fact that simvastatin is fat soluble. That fact that it dissolves in fat allows it to more easily go through cell membranes which are mostly made of fatty acids.
That also allows it to cross what is called the blood brain barrier. Once in the brain, its ability to breach barriers made of fat let it penetrate the fatty substance called myelin that insulates nerve cells
The end result: You wake up at night because of simvastatin’s brain effects and the important regenerative powers of sleep are compromised.
“The findings are significant because sleep problems can affect quality of life and may have adverse health consequences, such as promoting weight gain and insulin resistance,” says researcher Beatrice Golomb who is at the University of California at San Diego School of Medicine.
I’m no fan of any statin drug (they’ve been linked to muscle problems and memory difficulties), but statins that are not fat-soluble, like pravastatin, might be less troublesome.
“The results showed that simvastatin use was associated with significantly worse sleep quality. A significantly greater number of individuals taking simvastatin reported sleep problems than those taking either pravastatin or the placebo,” Golomb says. “On average, the lipophilic (fat soluble) statin had a greater adverse effect on sleep quality.”
If you suffer any kind of side effects when taking a statin – or for that matter any other drug – talk to your healthcare practitioner about how to get off that pharmaceutical. The last you thing you need is to suffer side effects that further degrade your health.
If you need help talking to your doctor about statins, my friend Dr. Isaac Eliaz provides some great information on why statins are not the panacea Big Pharma would have us believe and also offers some natural ways to deal with the problem that could be much better for you in the long run.
Hopefully, you doctor can help you switch to a drug without side effects that you can take. Or, preferably, you could explore natural ways.
