Merck’s Zocor May Keep You Up At Night
1 CommentBy Ed Silverman // November 7th, 2007 // 11:41 am
This calls for a development deal with one of those companies that sells a sleeping pill. A government-funded study finds that the cholesterol pill may cause insomnia and disrupt sleep patterns, Bloomberg News reports. Patients taking Zocor, which is also available in generic form, had significantly worse sleep quality compared with those on Bristol Myers Squibb’s Pravachol, sold generically as pravastatin.
“A significantly greater number of individuals taking simvastatin (Zocor) reported sleep problems than those taking either pravastatin or the placebo,” says Beatrice Golomb, the study’s lead author and an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego, in a statement.
About three times as many patients on Zocor said their sleep worsened after starting the drug, compared with those on pravastatin. The study followed 1,016 people for six months who were either on 20 milligrams of simvastatin, 40 milligrams of pravastatin, or a placebo. Insomnia, by the way, is listed as a possible side effect for all cholesterol-lowering drugs.
The difference between the two may lie in how they dissolve in the body. Zocor is able to dissolve in fats, allowing it to penetrate the barrier that keeps toxins out of the brain as well as the fatty layer covering nerve cells in the brain. Pravachol dissolves in water, so it is unable to get past these barriers. The study didn’t look at other fat-dissolving cholesterol pills, such as Lipitor, which works differently.
Merck spokesman Ron Rogers tells Bloomberg that the drugmaker found no significant effects on sleep in its own insomnia studies comparing Zocor with pravastatin and placebo. And Merck didn’t find any sleep disruption as a side effect in two other studies testing the drug’s effectiveness in thousands of patients.
The question of whether cholesterol drugs affect sleep has been around since the medicines came on the market, Golomb said. This is the largest study of its kind to look specifically at sleep, she said. The National Institutes of Health funded the study.
Source: Bloomberg News
Sharon
Zocor sleep disruption is obvious from the Prescribing Information, which lists damage to retinal ganglion cells. These intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells are the key to setting the body’s biorhythm for everyone, even the blind. The entire class of statin drugs is known to be neurotoxic (Dr. Gaist, in a populational study found that people over 50 on statins for 2 or more years were 26 times more likely to have peripheral neuropathy than the normal population. The World Health Organization found that Lou Gehrig’s Disease, ALS, was 17 times more frequent in statin users.). Damage to the retinal ganglion cells disrupts sleep.
So, it is no surprise that Zocor disrupts sleep - what is astonishing is that “Merck spokesman Ron Rogers tells Bloomberg that the drugmaker found no significant effects on sleep in its own insomnia studies comparing Zocor with pravastatin and placebo. And Merck didn’t find any sleep disruption as a side effect in two other studies testing the drug’s effectiveness in thousands of patients.”
Perhaps the Merck spokesman for Zocor hasn’t read the Zocor Prescribing Information?