PURPOSE This article reviews the most important muscle toxins, many of which are widely prescribed medications. Particular emphasis is placed on statins, which cause muscle symptoms in a relatively large proportion of the patients who take them. RECENT FINDINGS As with other toxic myopathies, most cases of statin-associated myotoxicity are self-limited and subside with discontinuation of the ...

Hydroxymethylglutaryl coenzyme A reductase (HMGCoAR) is required for isoprenoid and cholesterol biosynthesis. In Drosophila, reduced HMGCoAR activity results in germ cell migration defects. We show that pharmacological HMGCoAR inhibition alters zebrafish development and germ cell migration. Embryos treated with atorvastatin (Lipitor) exhibited germ cell migration defects and mild morphologic ab...

OBJECTIVE To investigate whether hydroxymethylglutaryl coenzyme A reductase inhibitors (statins) prevent the development of diabetic retinopathy. METHODS We conducted a nested case-control study among patients at the Birmingham Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Birmingham, Alabama. Within a study population of male diabetic patients (n=6441), we identified incident cases of diabetic retinopath...

The depletion of the essential nutrient CoQ10 by the increasingly popular cholesterol lowering drugs, HMG CoA reductase inhibitors (statins), has grown from a level of concern to one of alarm. With ever higher statin potencies and dosages, and with a steadily shrinking target LDL cholesterol, the prevalence and severity of CoQ10 deficiency is increasing noticeably. An estimated 36 million Ameri...

The corrole-based catalytic antioxidant reduced the cholesterol biosynthesis ability of macrophages, harvested from mice treated with it. and a non-redox active analogue of it affect the committed step of the biosynthetic pathway--the HMG-CoA reductase catalysed reaction--by acting as allosteric inhibitors of this key enzyme.

Concomitant administration of atorvastatin, omeprazole, and dexamethasone has been shown to increase the serum concentration of serum hydroxymethylglutaryl coenzyme A which can be associated with elevation of creatine kinase and an increased risk of severe myopathy and rhabdomyolysis. In this paper, we report a case of a 60-year-old female patient with stage IV colon cancer and compromised hepa...

1) In kinetic studies, mevinolin proved to be a highly specific inhibitor of partially purified yeast HMG-CoA reductase (Ki = 3.5 nM towards HMG-CoA) and of microsomal HMG-CoA reductase from etiolated radish seedlings (Ki = 2.2 nM). At low concentrations of NADPH, the inhibitor counteracts the sigmoidal response of plant HMG-CoA reductase activity towards the cosubstrate. At higher concentratio...

Introduction In a recent report by Farzadfar et al. on global trends in serum total cholesterol (TC), it is suggested that HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors (statins) are important for lowering of average TC in high-income countries and that statin use is a likely driver of the polarized trend in average TC seen between lowand high-income countries. On the other hand, our results show that statins a...