Statins are a class of drugs that help lower a person's cholesterol. Not only do they help to keep cholesterol from forming in the body, statins also seem to help the body adsorb cholesterol that has built up along the artery walls. Because high cholesterol is a risk factor in heart disease and stroke, statins are highly praised for their benefits.

Statins Reduce Bad Cholesterol

Statins' primary benefit is that they decrease cholesterol. The drugs were designed to hamper the liver's capacity to form the LDL (bad) cholesterol. Statins not only lower the LDL cholesterol that contributes to heart disease, they also raise HDL (good) cholesterol.

Statins Prevent Heart Attacks

Statins help patients who have suffered a heart attack by helping to reduce the risk of another heart attack. A statin study by scientists at Tel Aviv University, published February 10, 2009, in the Archives of Internal Medicine, revealed that patients who took statins for up to five years reduced the risk of death by 45%. Some of these patients had never had a heart attack or other kind of heart event. This indicated that statins helped prevent first heart attacks from ever happening.

Statins Offer Other Health Benefits

Patients taking the statins had a reduced mortality from other diseases like cancer. The report of the Tel Aviv University study also suggests that this finding indicates that statins seems to offer unexpected benefits the human body in a variety of ways.

Statins Lower Triglycerides

The American Heart Association reports that statins also seem to have some effect on lowering triglycerides (blood fats). People with high triglycerides also tend to have high cholesterol, so many people with heart disease have high triglycerides.

Considerations

A doctor will decide if statins should be prescribed for a patient based on the risk factors for heart attack and stroke. In addition to high cholesterol, these other factors include lifestyle, blood pressure, age, health, diabetes, excess weight, smoking or peripheral vascular disease.

Source:

Mayo Clinic

Time

American Heart Association

More Information:

WebMD