New cholesterol drugs are safer and should be more widely prescribed, a new study says. Cholesterol drugs are taken to lower high cholesterol and even healthy people should take them, experts have claimed. Researchers said the medication, which prevents the development of strokes and heart attacks, should be used despite of low cholesterol.
Scientists are now recommending healthy people to take cholesterol-lowering drugs after high cholesterol have caused ‘many needless premature deaths’. Also known as statins, cholesterol drugs, are a group of medicines that can help lower specifically the level of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol in the blood. LDL cholesterol, often referred to as ‘bad cholesterol’, could increase the likelihood of heart disease and stroke, experts say.
According to the UPI , a combination of new cholesterol drugs are found to drastically lower "bad" cholesterol levels, and appear safe for patients diagnosed with heart problems. But it's not quite clear whether it prevents heart attacks or strokes, researchers report. "It may be that people need very low cholesterol levels to get a benefit in terms of heart attacks and stroke reduction, but that remains to be determined," the director of University of Iowa's Preventive Intervention Center, Dr. Jennifer Robinson says.
Lipitor and Crestor are among common statin drugs. According to the Express , Robinson also states that statins have been found to be effective in cutting down bad cholesterol, and are safe and inexpensive. She also calls it a "kind of cheap insurance and a lot safer than aspirin".
She recommends statin as the best way to lower cholesterol if people can’t reduce cholesterol themselves. A study on 500,000 people with heart disease showed that those given a high dose of statins proved to have greater survival chances. The result have led experts to announce last year that new cholesterol drugs can help save lives of heart disease patients.
