But I will give this a try because I would like to avoid taking a statin drug, if possible.
At the Rite-Aid pharmacy where I usually had my prescriptions filled, I picked up a refill of the statin drug that I had taken for many years.
The chart below shows how much Vytorin use has plummeted as Vytorin (in light blue) has gone from being the third-most-prescribed statin drug to one of the least prescribed.
To reach this goal Harvard's Ridker is leading a 15, 000-patient trial testing whether AstraZeneca's statin drug, Crestor, can prevent heart attacks in patients with normal cholesterol levels but high C-reactive protein levels.
The big debate about the drug is whether lowering cholesterol with Zetia is as good as using a higher dose of a statin drug like Lipitor, Zocor or AstraZeneca (nyse: AZN - news - people )'s Crestor.
Tredaptive included niacin, a statin and another drug meant to reduce the flushing side effect of niacin.
The drug is given on top of an existing statin, and further lowers cholesterol by absorbing it in the digestive system.
In contrast, Vytorin contains a slightly weaker statin, Merck's Zocor, but boosts it with a second drug, called Zetia, that prevents the body from absorbing cholesterol from food.
Earlier this month, the pharmaceutical company Pfizer announced that it may ask the Food and Drug Administration to allow it to market the cholesterol-lowering statin Lipitor over the counter after its patent expires in November.
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Another statin, atorvastatin (Trade name: Lipitor, Pfizer) became the biggest selling drug of all time and simvastatin also became an all time best seller.
FORBES: Do We Really Need Head-To-Head Comparison Trials With Statins To Improve Cardiac Health?
Hazlett notes another promising drug: an anti-cholesterol treatment called ezetimibe that makes any of the vaunted statin drugs more attractive.
Washington (CNN) -- An entire class of statin drugs will get new labels that alert the public to safety concerns, the Food and Drug Administration announced Tuesday.
We did not see it occurring as a drug interaction, where patients were also taking other medications that were reacting with the statin to cause the confusional state.
The American College of Cardiology panel and two editorials in The New England Journal of Medicine recommended sidelining use of Zetia, a kind of cholesterol drug that works differently from statins, and Vytorin, a combo pill of Zetia and the statin Zocor.
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