Dr. Zorba Paster: Be aware of potential risks if you take Lipitor

Imagine a drug that cuts heart disease by half. Youd probably take it, but before you started youd probably want to know what the side effects are.

Hopefully your doctor would mention the most common serious side effects, and the pharmacist could give you a complete list but those can be a mile long. There often are so many possible side effects, you can get dizzy just reading about them.

And then theres the Internet, a mixed bag of good information and junk.

Before you see these side effects on that list, the drug is vetted by the Food and Drug Administration. Unfortunately, those lists do not always take into consideration the most up-to-date research because one or two studies arent enough. Concrete evidence is needed before that list is updated.

So what should you do? If the side-effect list is always two steps behind, how can you make a reasonable choice on whether to take a medication?

My answer: health literacy.

Read the newspapers, listen to National Public Radio, surf the Internet and talk to your friends. Taken all together, it improves your odds.

Now back to that heart-disease drug. New research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that women taking statins such as Lipitor to help lower cholesterol and thus improve hearth health increase their risk for developing diabetes.

The study was a good one that covered more than 15 years and evaluated 150,000 post-menopausal women age 50 to 80 who did not have diabetes when the study began. About 7 percent of these women were started on statins, and during the next 10 years there were 10,000 new cases of diabetes.

After taking into consideration known risk factors for diabetes such as obesity and family history, researchers found that statins increased the chances of developing diabetes. In other words, some women became diabetic just because they were on statins.

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Dr. Zorba Paster: Be aware of potential risks if you take Lipitor