Unveiling the Risks of Statins: Muscle Damage and Low Testosterone

0:00 The most common side effect people experience with statins, or they injure their muscles are something called rhabdomyolysis where you get muscle breakdown. And you get these proteins that are thrown into the bloodstream that could potentially cause kidney disease or kidney failure or heart failure. 0:15 One of the things that would kind of throw me off was, you know, world class, we're not gonna name names here in terms of the provider, they're the hospitals, but they was very conventional treatment where he didn't have a nonzero calcium score. And so he was recommended a basic medication, right? What are your thoughts on that? You know, for somebody who's active, somebody works out somebody, you know? 0:31 Yeah. So like he was he was talking about statins. Statins are pretty much first line therapy for people who have elevated cholesterol, there's a lot of data suggesting that they likely will reduce heart attacks, what a lot of people don't recognize is you can reduce your cholesterol pretty significantly through diet. And the other thing a lot of people don't recognize there are real side effects of taking statins, even at low doses. There's a couple of articles out there that looked at side effects of statins, the most common being said associated muscle symptoms. And then someone who's active This is a big deal. By far the most common side effect people experience with statins are they injure their muscles. And these can be things like muscle tears, or joint pain, or my apathy or something called rhabdomyolysis where basically you get muscle breakdown and you get these proteins that are thrown into the bloodstream that could potentially cause kidney disease or kidney failure or heart failure is something that's kind of overlooked because it doesn't occur to the vast majority of patients on statins. But if you're, you know, if you're an active individual, if you work out, yeah, you're much more likely to potentially see these issues. Another thing that people don't really recognize is and this is quite controversial. satins basically block an enzyme that's crucially important in cholesterol production on liver, right? HMG co reductase. Right. And so basically, you just radically reduce cholesterol levels, but cholesterol is a really important hormone. It's important and bile acids important in the lipid bilayer and your cell membranes supporting mitochondrial health everyone talks about like, you know, ensuring that your your mitochondria are functioning appropriately sad has actually been linked to oxidative damage in your mitochondria, it oxidative damage, your mitochondria get decreased ATP production, you get decreased, you get fatigued since sounds are very important, the myelin sheath around nerves. There have been some suggestions that's linked to several neurologic conditions. It is pretty controversial link between Sans and dementia. Some studies have suggested there's no link other studies that suggest there is no link. But you know, in the literature, medical literature, we go back and forth about a lot of things. If there are studies suggesting there might be a link I would, I don't know. I probably tried to remove it. And there are definitely some studies that suggest that there even links to neuropsychiatric issues like aggression, agitation, irritability, and so so there's 2:39 a neurological decline. Like we see a lot of guys entrepreneurs or business owners like in their 40s Like getting PEC tears, right and other sorts of sprains because overtraining, overtraining is kind of a big deal. 2:49 The other thing that I've seen in terms of our clinic where we basically look at the patient as a as a whole and in ball supplements, diet, exercise and hormonal optimization sands are associated with androgen deprivation, the androgen decreases, right. And so, they may be linked to low testosterone levels because cholesterol is a very important compound in steroid production getting on standard might, in some part be causing someone to have low testosterone levels, which is you know, something that has been noted but really isn't publicized that often.