Important medical news for anyone taking statins to reduce cholesterol

Take CoQ 10 supplements, too!  In a video interview (and online article if you don't want to watch the video), Dr. Duane Graveline, a family doctor with 23 years experience and a former astronaut, discusses the health implications of cholesterol, statin drugs, and coenzyme Q10. 

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/02/12/dr-duane-graveline-on-cholesterol-and-coq10.aspx

Dr. Graveline has an interesting background that makes him particularly suited to speak on the topic of statin drugs. He's a medical doctor with 23 years of experience whose health was seriously damaged by a statin drug. His personal questions brought him out of retirement to investigate statins, which he's been doing for the past 10 years.

As a former astronaut, he would get annual physicals at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. In 1999 his cholesterol hit 280 and he was given a prescription for Lipitor.

"When they suggested Lipitor (10 mg), I went along with it because I had no reason to be particularly worried about statin drugs," he says. "I had used it a year or so before my retirement, but I wasn't a big user."

However, it quickly became apparent that something was seriously wrong.  For rest of story, go to:  http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/02/12/dr-duane-graveline-on-cholesterol-and-coq10.

It's now clear that if you take statin drugs without taking CoQ10, your health is at serious risk as statin drugs deplete your body of this essential co-enzyme. As your body gets more and more depleted of CoQ10, you may suffer from fatigue, muscle weakness and soreness, and eventually heart failure. Coenzyme Q10 is also very important in the process of neutralizing free radicals.

So when your CoQ10 is depleted, you enter a vicious cycle of increased free radicals, loss of cellular energy, and damaged mitochondrial DNA.

Unfortunately, the majority of people who take statins are unaware of their need for CoQ10, and physicians rarely advise their patients to take this supplement along with their statin—at least in the United States. It's also important to supplement right from the start. According to Dr. Graveline, once the mitochondrial damage and mutations are formed they cannot be reversed—no matter how much CoQ10 you take.

So early intervention is key. (Dr. Graveline goes into further detail of how CoQ10 offers protection against mitochondrial DNA damage in this interview, so for more information, please listen to it in its entirety.) If you decide to take a CoQ10 supplement and are over the age of 40, it's important to choose the reduced version, called ubiquinol.

Ubiquinol is a FAR more effective form—I personally take 1-3 a day as it has far-ranging health benefits. Dr. Graveline concurs with this recommendation.

As for dosage, Dr. Graveline makes the following recommendation:

• If you have symptoms of statin damage such as muscle pain, take anywhere from 200 to 500 mg
• If you just want to use it preventively, 200 mg or less should be sufficient

There's also evidence that CoQ10/ubiquinol is beneficial for Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease, and even cancer, and that large doses may be justified in those cases as well.

In addition, CoQ10 is believed to play an important role in preventing premature aging in general by preventing telomere shortening, which can slow or potentially even reverse the aging process. This is just one of the additional benefits of CoQ10, and one of the reasons why I take ubiquinol daily even though I've never been on a statin drug.

There are no reported side effects of CoQ10 supplementation, and neither I nor Dr. Graveline have ever heard of anyone overdosing on it. The only drawback is cost.

However, if you're taking ubiquinol, here's some cost-saving information for you.

Certified reduced ubiquinol is only manufactured by one company in the entire world, a Japanese company called Kaneca. They own the patent. So, as long as it's certified ubiquinol, you can buy the cheapest brand you can find, because they're all the same.