Dr. Zorba Paster: Diabetes risk for people taking statins highlights importance of health literacy

Dr. ZORBA PASTER | family physician, Dean Health madison.com | | Posted: Wednesday, March 7, 2012 8:00 am

Imagine a drug that cuts heart disease by half. Would you take it? Probably. But before you started, you would want to know what the side effects were.

Your doctor, if good, would mention the most common serious side effects. The pharmacist could give you a list of side effects but those lists can be a mile long. There are often so many possible side effects you can get dizzy just reading it.

And then there's the Web. The Web is a mixed bag, sometimes good information and sometimes junk.

Every drug has side effects. Before you see these side effects on that pharmacy 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. Why, you ask? Because one or two studies doesn't merit changing that side-effect list. Concrete evidence is needed before that list is updated.

So what should you do? If the side-effect profile list is always two steps behind, how can you make a reasonable choice on whether or not to take a medication? My answer: health literacy. Read the newspapers, listen to NPR, surf the Web 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.

So the question for those taking such a drug is: What should I do? Let me walk you through this.

The study was a good one massive and well-designed, going on for more than 15 years and evaluating 150,000 post-menopausal women aged 50 to 80 who did not have diabetes when the study began. About 7 percent of these women were started on statins for their cholesterol. Over 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: Diabetes risk for people taking statins highlights importance of health literacy