<p>Is cholesterol medicine prescribed for it’s long term effects? Something to take when you are 30-40-50-60 to make sure your arteries stay healthy for a long time.</p>
<p>Should 80+ year old people still be taking it? We have a family member who suffers side effects from all but one medicine, it is nearly $200/mo and she takes 6 pills a day :eek: for genetic high triglycerides, not diet related.</p>
<p>What would be the risks to stopping the $2400 a year and the side effects and no longer taking the medication?</p>
<p>What about blood pressure meds for borderline conditions? Over the last 20 years, the acceptable BP readings have dropped. How critical is it for the very senior crowd?</p>
<p>What questions might they ask their doctor in order to decide what is right for them?</p>
<p>Mom is almost 94, taking bp pills and bp is still 180+/100. Too much bp pills lowers her bp to where she is even more unsteady. </p>
<p>Dad is almost 91 and ate bad food all his life, a gp family doc until 82. No BP pills. (he has had a quad bypass at 77 and 4 stents and minor stroke. </p>
<p>I’m 60 with Lovasa, Crestor, BP pills, aspirin, metformin, exercise daily, and eat healthy. My cholestrol has always been good but my triglyercides are currently near 200 and often much higher. I was on Tricor for many years which probably damaged my liver, aggrevating my diabetes II, and causing undue tremendous pain and sleep loss and barely affected the triglyeride level. Cut out the white foods and you mom will find that the trig numbers will fall. </p>
<p>If the thinking is she is old and going to die soon anyway then she probably doesn’t need to keep taking the medications. Kinda like an old car - why spend money changing the oil if it’s going to the junkyard soon? But if she wants to keep going and avoid illness and death as best she can, then lowering her risk of heart disease is with medicine is probably a pretty good idea.</p>
<p>What are the risks? Ask her doctors. My mom lived to be 98. She took so many pills every day that they were divided into segments of a.m. lunch p.m. I know because she lived with me at the end of her life. I was the pill person. The quality of her life was fantastic until about 95. She had congestive heart failure. She got a pacemaker around that time that allowed her to get up and move with the help of a walker. Like most of us, she didn’t want to die. I can honestly say that at the end of her life I cursed the pills and the pacemaker because she had been such an energetic woman and to watch her fail was so awful and they were the things that allowed her to “march” on. I do remember her cardiologist saying that with the very old, some of the pills that work so well with older people cause problems later on down the road if they live that long. But her prescriptions were not changed except on how her blood work went. She didn’t die in a nursing home tucked away somewhere. She died at home. That was a blessing.</p>
<p>I’m not a doctor and not giving medical advice. But I think it’s totally ridiculous that people in their eighties are taking statins. High blood pressure should be treated, but high cholesterol? I don’t think so. My husband’s aunt is 99 years old and still going strong. Her cholesterol is 300 and not being treated. It hasn’t hurt her at all. Those drugs are expensive and have bad side effects. My 87 year old aunt was put on Lipitor. It made her nauseous every day. She felt she had morning sickness. When she complained to her doctor, he took her off the pills. I think the pharmaceutical industry has sold us all a bill of goods with this cholesterol stuff. End of rant!</p>
<p>Lurkness- that is what brought up the discussion, she tried several generics and was nauseated and sick for quite a while.</p>
<p>Her husband died of cancer and her took his cholesterol and BP pills all throughout being terminal!</p>
<p>Yes, she is in good health and yes, she takes care of herself. There is not reason to think she won’t live at least 10 years, but the question we were discussing is, “What is the positive affect of statins?” Is it something that makes a difference in the long run or immediately? Do you stop when you are 80-75-90-95? Ever?</p>
<p>@somemom - She is not taking a Statin. She is likely taking Welcol (6 pills) which works differently and binds cholesterol in the gut. I also works to stabilize blood sugars. It’s a difficult question as the risk/benefit analysis is different for everyone and no one has done risk/benefit analysis on folks in their 80’s. I believe it’s a quality of life issue. If taking 6 pills (though they do have a once a day powder formula now) and spending the money makes her unhappy, and she’s comfortable with the theoretical increased risk of heart disease, I see no reason for her to continue. I agree with another poster, cut out the white stuff.</p>
<p>Aha, you are right, it is welcol; I will tell her about the powder once a day, that might be an improvement.</p>
<p>How does one determine the risk/benefit analysis? What is the increased risk of heart disease to her? She is quite healthy and wants to stay that way, but wonders what this medicine is really doing for her.</p>
<p>You don’t really know what the risk/benefit is for her. It used to be that cholesterol lowering meds weren’t indicated for octogenerians but with longer life-spans, that has changed. But, there are no long-term studies done on this group of individuals. So, no way of telling. If she stops the meds, she may or may not have an increased incidence of cardio-vascular disease.</p>
<p>I’m sure pharma will soon have a bevy of studies “proving” the urgency of cholesterol meds for people into their 90s. The lobbyists will be unleashed to codify the need in federal regulations. And millions will be spent educating health professionals to write the prescriptions.</p>
<p>Probably without one scintilla of evidence that such meds actually improve the life expectancy for the octegenarian population in the real world. There will, however, be a strong correlation with quarterly earnings reports.</p>
<p>Seeing the way pharma has taken over smoking cessation, lock, stock, and barrel has been a real eye-opener. They fund every piece of research. Their paid researchers have every seat on the policy boards writing the treatment guidelines in every Western health service, to the point where US health care providers are required to discourage any smoker from attempting to quit without purchasing pharma products. This, despite the fact that 90% of all successful ex-smokers quit without medication or pharmaceutical nicotine products and that real-world population studies have been showing that people who quit with no planning and no quit date and no pharma products are twice as likely to be non-smokers at the one year mark. The conclusion of the pharma funded researchers to those findings: "We need to make pharma nicotine products more widely available to “help” those who quit with no planning.</p>
<p>The international conferences are sponsored by the drug companies, every presenter talks about research showing the need for increased use fo the sponsor’s products – higher doses, using multiple products, longer time frames, etc. The conferences end up looking like trade shows for pharma. The American Cancer Society licenses its logo to SmithKlineGlax for nicotine gum. Meanwhile, smoking cessation rates have been driven into the ditch and the entire industry has gone down a dead end that isn’t helping people in the real world. Imagine, the message is that it’s impossible to quit smoking, so impossible that you shouldn’t even think of trying without continuing to take nicotine (an insecticide poison) all day every day. What kind of a message is that?</p>
<p>The controlled studies are a joke. They measure successful “quitting” at the 12 week point when the subjects are still taking the replacement nicotine! Duh. By that measure, morphine can be used to “cure” heroin addicts!. And the control is nicotine patches or gum that has no nicotine. That’s not the same as comparing to quitting without assistance. Of course people who sign up for a nicotine patch study to “help” them quickly figure out that they are getting the fake patches.</p>
<p>I sincerely hope that the studies for all these other medications are less cynical than the marketing of smoking cessation products, which is really a long-term campaign by pharma to carve out a chunk of the nicotine addiction market. Tobacco and pharma are now in the same business and neither one wants a single single nicotine addict to walk away from the drug addiction that makes them a long-term profitable customer.</p>
<p>The same argument could be made for withholding pretty much all health care for people in their 80s, since very few of them will live beyond a few more years no matter what medical treatment is given. If the goal here is to save a buck, sure, cut out the meds. Anyone in their 80s is in sudden-death overtime anyway. Might save a little on the nursing home care bill too if they check out a little sooner. It’s all good.</p>
<p>ID touches on a sad fact in American medicine. If the studies were available, almost all are sponsored by pharmaceutical companies and contain inherent biases. In addition, physicians who are sponsored by pharmaceutical companies sit on the boards that decide “standard of care.” Even the New England Journal of Medicine is not an unbiased source anymore.</p>
<p>Not really. There is a much medical care that focuses on treating specific illness and/or improving quality of life. For example, if an 80 year old breaks an arm or has a bacterial infection, you would obviously treat that. But, we are talking about medication that is reducing the person’s quality of life with the only payoff being the potential for long-term life expectancy. If you can’t show that a drug with only long-term benefits actually offers long-term benefits to a class of patients, then what is the point, other than quarterly profits?</p>
<p>If you do take high doses of niacin, make sure you use prescription niaspan or otc slo-niacin. Taking high doses of regular niacin can cause a lot of side effects.<br>
Currently, pharmaceutical companies sponsor over 75% of all drug related studies in the U.S. Just because a study is sponsored by a company, does not mean there are inherent biases in the study. I am more concerned if they do both the sponsoring and the statistics than if they just sponsored it. When you look at the studies, you just have to read them carefully. You have to read more than just the abstract. All studies must have a listing on clinicaltrials.gov. The general opinion is that with new drugs, it can take upwards of 2 years on the market to get to really know it well.</p>