The Chicken Or The Egg

On the New York Times Opinion Page there was an article linking diabetes to Statin drugs…

The Diabetes Dilemma for Statin Users

By ERIC J. TOPOL
Published: March 4, 2012

This past week, the Food and Drug Administration raised questions about the side effects of these drugs and developed new labels for these medications that will now warn of the risk of diabetes and memory loss. The announcement said the risk was “small” and should not materially affect the use of these medications. The data are somewhat ambiguous for memory loss. But the magnitude of the problem for diabetes becomes much more apparent with careful examination of the data from large clinical trials.
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For those statins, the higher the dose, the more diabetes, though we don’t have enough data yet to say with precision at which dose excess diabetes showed up for each drug. What we do know is that diabetes showed up. The numbers increase to one in 167 for patients taking 20 milligrams of Crestor, and up to one in 125 for intensive statin treatments involving drug strategies to markedly lower cholesterol levels. Let’s just round this off and say that one in every 200 patients treated with any of the three most potent statins will get the side effect of diabetes. That’s quite a conservative number because diabetes was not even being carefully looked for in most of the trials. And we have data for only 5 years of treatment; it might be worse with longer statin therapy.
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We need to find out why statins cause diabetes and, ideally, through genomics we could determine who is at risk for this important side effect. But to date nothing has been done to sort this out — despite the fact that the market for statins is well over $20 billion per year. There are thousands of blood samples sitting in company freezers around the world that could potentially provide the answers.

Could it possibly be that people who like soda, pastries and fast food are put on statins to lower their cholesterol, but their blood sugars are still unchecked?

I know for me I ate all those foods without a worry because my cholesterol was under control, but little did I know then that it was leading to me getting diabetes.

So does the Statin lead to diabetes or does the lifestyle of the person lead to both high cholesterol and diabetes. I tend to believe the latter