Statin disabling Adverse Effects put patient AND spouse at risk

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Sharon Hope - 17 Feb 2006 04:51 GMT

An important new study done by the Harvard Medical School and published in
the New England Journal of medicine has identified and quantified some risk
to caregivers.

The news report about the study did not mention statins directly, but we all
bring information we already know to what we read.

In my case, I know Lipitor 10 mg/day for 4 years can, and did, cause severe
disability in my spouse of over 35 years - chronic extreme pain, muscle
deterioration, elevated CK (putting kidneys and liver at risk),
mitochondrial damage, myopathy, myositis, peripheral neuropathy, insomnia,
transient global amnesia, severe cognitive damage, aphasia, and extreme
short-term memory loss (DEMENTIA is another term for such memory loss), and
now exertion-induced gout - this in a high-achieving, vigorous, very
successful man in his early 50s, twice a corporate CEO.

The severe disability destroyed his health, cognitive abilities, ability to
funciton, ability to stand, ability to walk or interact with people - and
needless to say destroyed his business and quality of life.

Four years off the Lipitor, there has been some recovery - enough certainly
to absolutely point to the Lipitor as the cause - but not yet enough to go
beyond a seriously disabled state.

Rather than allow myself to sink into a bottomless pit of despair, I, like
so many spouses of similarly disabled statin patients I have since had the
honor to know (however unfortunate our shared pain), have devoted nearly
every waking minute to being a champion for my spouse, seeking out the best
doctors, searching for a treatment toward a cure, and collecting
peer-reviewed medical journal publications that are evidence of such
disabling statin adverse effects - in hopes of warning others and preventing
them from going through what we have experienced. (That, and working 50 to
60 hour weeks at a demanding job to maintain an income.) Other spouses and
family members of statin-disabled have made similar contributions,
establishing and maintaining a message board for others, for example.

My husband bravely allowed a fine journalist, Eleanor Laise of Smart Money
Magazine, to publicize and expose his own drastically disabled state in a
national magazine, in hopes someone might benefit from his pain and
debilitation. We know it helped many more than the scores of people who
contacted us personally to thank us for helping them to understand the
problems they, too, were experiencing on statins.

Many have quietly thanked us for sounding the alarm. Some moronic trolls
have attempted to discredit the effort - objecting blythely to one or two of
hundreds of published studies - as if that objection is of higher quality
than the journal that published the article and as if the other hundreds of
references did not exist - or attacking the effort by ascribing dark
motives, or insisting it was motivated by guilt in a very sick
blame-the-patient-and-shoot-the-messenger perverted way of thinking and
acting, or even claiming the pain and suffering is irrelevant because it is
not universal or 'rare', or irrationally claiming it was somehow fortunate
because it was the only possible alternative to a guaranteed certain heart
attack (no mention of how the human race has lasted this long, given this
line of thinking that leads these ng lurkers to insist the only choices in
life are to take a statin or die of a heart attack). (Odd, too, that faced
with such extreme adversity on a daily basis as we spouses/families of the
statin-disabled are, these nay-saying ng trolls actually seem to think their
negativity could make any impression at all.)

I don't think it ever occurred to us spouses that we were fighting for more
than just the health of our spouses, the good of our families, and the
chance some unknown families need not be similarly damaged. We knew, of
course, the impact to our and our family's quality of life, the drastic
financial damage that occurred in what would have been peak earning years -
while putting the kids through college, and the heartache of seeing a
beloved spouse in a blind tunnel of horrific pain 24-hours a day with
absolutely no respite.

It turns out, at least according to the results of the aforementioned study,
we were also fighting for our own very lives!

According to the study, we female spouses of statin-caused Dementia patients
are at
an AVERAGE of TWENTY EIGHT PERCENT higher risk of death. This is higher
than the 17% increased risk of our death upon the death of a spouse.
Caregivers of dementia patients are themselves at higher risk of dying!

For those who might be in a similar caregiver position of a dementia patient
or otherwise disabled spouse, regardless of cause, this study is something
you should know about. I don't have the full-text version, and because of
copyright rules, I will not post the entire article, only those points that
I found worthy of highlight, but you owe it to yourselves to read the full
article - and send it on to others who should know about it.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,185104,00.html

Caretakers of Ill Spouses Have Greater Risk of Death

Thursday, February 16, 2006

By Daniel J. DeNoon

Seniors who care for their seriously ill spouses may pay the ultimate price.

A groundbreaking new study shows that caring for a sick spouse can raise the
caretaker's risk of death. For some particularly disabling illnesses --
dementia, in particular -- the toll on the caretaker is worse than the toll
of a spouse's death.

It's been known for more than 150 years that the death of a spouse ups the
surviving partner's risk of death. Now it's shown that illness, too, can
break your heart.

"We showed you can die of a broken heart not just when your partner dies,
but when your partner falls ill," researcher Nicholas Christakis, MD, PhD,
said in a news conference. "We showed it is not just death that can give you
a broken heart, but illness -- even when the spouses don't die."

Christakis, professor health care policy at Harvard Medical School in
Boston, and colleagues report the findings in the Feb. 16 issue of The New
England Journal of Medicine.

<read more at the link provided>

The death of a spouse increased a man's risk of death by 21 percent and a
woman's risk of death by 17 percent. Overall, the illness of a spouse was
only one-fifth as deadly to caretakers as the death of a spouse.

But some spousal illnesses took at least as great a toll as death:

--A spouse's psychiatric illness raised the risk of death by 19 percent for
men and by 32 percent for women.

--A spouse's dementia raised the risk of death by 22 percent for men and by
28 percent for women.

--Other diseases that take a heavy toll on caretakers included heart
failure, hip fracture or other serious fracture, and chronic lung disease.

--A spouse's cancer did not increase caretaker death risk.

"It is the disablement and not the lethality of a spouse's illness that can
be harmful to you and contribute to your risk of dying," Christakis says.

There's another factor that makes it hard on spouses: poverty.

<read more at the link provided>

"Because people are interconnected, we think this phenomenon we studied in
elderly married couples applies more generally," Christakis says. "We are
looking at broader connections -- between parent and child, brother and
sister, neighbors, and friends."

By Daniel J. DeNoon, reviewed by Louise Chang, MD

SOURCES: Christakis, N.A. The New England Journal of Medicine, Feb. 16,
2006; vol 354: pp 719-730. Nicholas Christakis, MD, PhD, professor,
department of health care policy, Harvard Medical School, Boston. Suzanne
Salamon, MD, associate chief, clinical geriatrics, Beth Israel Deaconess
Medical Center, Boston.