The battle to lower you LDL or your bad cholesterol continues. Having too much bad cholesterol not only means you’ll have too much plaque in your arteries. It also means that the LDL cholesterol will get into the middle layer of artery. More gunk piles up faster and the inside of your arteries become inflamed. Blood can’t get through the artery and you have a heart attack.

A small research project, focusing on the lowly niacin, a B vitamin, was reported this past November. The report said that niacin did a better job of shrinking artery plaque than the active ingredient in the cholesterol drugs Zetia and Vytorin which are produced by Merck.

It was a small trial sponsored by Abbot Labs with only 208 people involved but it was carefully designed and followed. Allen Taylor of the Medstar Research Institute and John Kastelein, of the University of Amsterdam presented their findings at a meeting of the American Heart Association and the results were published in the The New England Journal of Medicine.

The study pitted ezetimibe against slow release Niaspan, made by Abbot. The result showed that Niaspan reduced artery plaque by 2 percent and Zetia did not. Two people in the Niaspan group had heart attacks while nine did in the Zetia group.

The result was so pronounced that the study stopped in 14 months. Even so there is nothing simple about science. Many people who use niacin report flushing and itching. Most doctors discourage over-the-counter niacin because there’s no evidence that it works and whether its safe.

Merck still stands by its drug. The company says it has enrolled 15,000 patients in a trail designed to show whether ezetimibe works. The trial will probably last for some time because they’re not weighing in the data unless at least 5000 heart attacks are recorded.  That could take years. In the mean time, stay alert and find out as much as you can about the prescription drugs you are taking.
If cholesterol is an issue for you, talk to your doctor and do some research on your own about the different medications that try to lower your LDL and your total cholesterol.

To your healthy aging and the best of holidays.
Ruthan Brodsky

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Filed under: Conditions and Diseases

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