Women who take statin drugs have 83-143% increased risk of breast cancer

Tuesday, August 13, 2013 by: Jonathan Benson, staff writer
Tags: statin drugs, breast cancer, prostate cancer

(NaturalNews) New research published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention raises fresh concerns about the safety of statin drugs for high cholesterol, particularly amongst the female population. According to this population-based, case-controlled study, women who take statin drugs appear to have up to a 143 percent increased risk of developing breast cancer compared to women not taking the dangerous drugs.

The study, which involved 2,886 women from the Seattle-Puget Sound region of Washington state, looked at statin drug use among women with several prominent types of breast cancer, as well as control women with no breast cancer. All the women were between the ages of 55 and 74, and researchers questioned them both in-person and using questionnaires to look for a potential relationship between statin drug use and breast cancer prevalence.

After evaluating the data using a polytomous logistic regression model, the team determined that the women who used statin drugs were far more prone to developing either an invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC) or an invasive lobular carcinoma (ILC) compared to women who did not take any statin drugs. Overall breast cancer risk was even more pronounced among women diagnosed with hypercholesterolemia, also known as high cholesterol.

"Whereas recent publicity on statin drugs has focused on their potential use for cancer prevention or as anti-cancer agents, this study found exactly the opposite," writes Sayer Ji for GreenMedInfo.com. "[C]urrent users of statins for 10 years or longer [have] a 1.83-fold increased risk of invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC) and a 1.97-fold increased risk of invasive lobular carcinoma (ILC) compared to never users of statins."

"Additionally, among women diagnosed with hypercholesterolemia, a condition marked by high levels of lipids and lipoproteins in the blood, current users of statins for 10 years or longer had more than double the risk of both IDC [an average of 104% increased risk] and ILC [an average of 143% increased risk] compared to never users," adds Ji.

You can read the study abstract here:
http://www.greenmedinfo.com

Statins also linked to causing prostate cancer in men

Men who take statin drugs are also at an elevated risk of developing gender-specific cancer. According to a 2011 study published in the journal Prostate, men who take statin drugs of any kind are significantly more prone to developing prostate cancer compared to other men. Even men who used to take statin drugs, but no longer do, have a higher-than-normal risk, according to the data.

Compared to men who have never taken a statin drug, statin users were found to have a much as an 86 percent increased risk of developing prostate cancer. And the longer a man users statin drugs, the higher his risk, as cumulative doses of the drug appear to substantially elevate cancer risk over time.

"Despite the spin, cholesterol lowering drugs (fibrates and statins) are proving to be not so wonderful," writes Shane Ellison, M.S., from The People's Chemist about the scientifically obvious link between statin drugs and cancer. "The fact that cholesterol lowering drugs can potentially cause cancer at doses commonly used by humans will never be accepted as mainstream knowledge," he adds, noting that drug industry-funded studies hailing statin drugs as safe are typically constructed in a deceptive or outright fraudulent manner.

Sources for this article include:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

http://thepeopleschemist.com

http://science.naturalnews.com