"by Maggie Fox, Reuters | February 25, 2008
WASHINGTON - A new panel of tests aimed at finding out how drugs may damage cells has turned up a series of interactions that may explain some of the serious side effects of statin drugs, researchers said yesterday.
Statins, the wildly popular cholesterol-lowering drugs, may interact with at least one blood pressure drug to damage the mitochondria, the powerhouses of cells, the researchers reported in the journal Nature Biotechnology.
Their study also may lead to the development of drugs to treat diabetes and diseases of aging as well as better ways to screen for drug side effects, the researchers said.
Vamsi Mootha of the Broad Institute at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said the team had made its new database freely available to other scientists to use for screening drugs....
Many patients who take statins have reported side effects that include muscle pain and weakness. The cause is not well understood, but Mootha has long suspected the mitochondria are involved. The effects have been hard to pin down because studies of different groups have produced conflicting results...."
Thus allowing the Legal Drug Pushers to continue to sell their poison.
