Does simvastatin cause weight loss or weight gain

Is simvastatin associated with weight loss or weight gain? Statins are not associated with significant weight gain or weight loss, but there are other factors to consider. Statins may affect leptin and can increase the risk of Type 2 Diabetes, both can lead to weight gain.

Hi this is josh i’m a pharmacist with pharmacist tips calm i’m gonna talk to you about simvastatin and specifically does simvastatin cause weight gain or december stat and cause weight loss so real quick what is simvastatin it is a medicine used to treat cholesterol and a family of medicines known as statins in the us had sold under the brand names ol core common

Side effects this is in the 1 to 10 percent categories one out of 10 people may have side effects 9 out of 10 seem to tolerate the medicine just fine nausea stomach pain diarrhea constipation headache muscle pain rash and then increased liver enzymes often times your primary care provider will do labs to make sure all of those things are where they need to be weight

Loss any weight loss associated with simvastatin not really it’s considered less than 1% other side effects that could contribute to the weight loss include nausea and loss of appetite if you seem to be having some issues with weight loss and simvastatin that’s a conversation to have with your doctor although i’d never seen it almost 20 years as a pharmacist what

About weight gain with simvastatin it is also on the less than 1% category but there’s more to this story than just the reported side effect of weight gain there is some concern that statins can increase fasting blood sugar over time and we’re going to go through just a couple interesting studies one shows it may decrease leptin and the other one shows there is a

Known risk for increase in diabetes and type 2 diabetes type 2 diabetes is often associated with weight gain especially with that fasting blood sugar going up many people find it hard to maintain or lose weight when their blood sugar is higher so first let’s look at a article from physiological reports this is one about leptin statins decreased leptin expression in

Human white fat cells okay so what does that mean decrease leptin in the fat cells well leptin signaling is important satiety factor meaning that tells you when you’re full when to stop eating this study they found that it acts statins act directly on human fat cells to regulate both leptin expression so what it means it could contribute at least in part they kind

Of go back and forth on how important leptin is you know it’s certainly involved in maintenance of body weight but to what extent we don’t know for certain but it does seem in some people it this decrease in leptin may result in increased food intake in certain statin users as they simply don’t feel full they’re not satiated after eating so here we’re gonna talk

About the diabetes risk this is a journal article from postgraduate medicine by the way i’ll have a link to both of these journal articles in the video description so feel free to click on those read a little bit more about it but this article is about statins in general not specifically simvastatin and the risk for type 2 diabetes what clinicians should know so

What did they kind of highlight okay so if you have risk factors for that’s type 2 diabetes you need to be careful when starting statin therapy however people with diabetes have cardiovascular disease risks and that’s why they’re put on the statin to decrease the heart attack of the decrease the risk of heart attack and stroke they’re showing here that the use of

Statin therapy is still better it’s is still better to use it than the risk of developing diabetes that for the prevention of heart attack and stroke but another thing i think we don’t talk about as much as we should in western medicine is the importance of lifestyle management exercise and diet can do a lot you really think about think about some of the processed

Food we eat to think of it as medicine and that medicine that you are ingesting has a side effect of die beaders and high cholesterol i mean if we if we considered food medicine i think a lot of people would just take a different look at it it’s inexpensive it’s easy to get but it also has some terrible side effects that food that so certainly consider that it

Could reduce the need for higher doses or reduce the need altogether for medicines like these again you’d want to always be certainly talk to your doctor before you would do any dietary or exercise changes i hope you found this information useful or at least food for thought always always always talk to your doctor or your primary care provider with questions

About your medicines if you feel like you’re having side effects if you’re not tolerating talk to them ask questions about simvastatin or other medicines and the comments below i will do my best to answer them and subscribe to my channel if you like videos like this thank you for watching

Transcribed from video
Does simvastatin cause weight loss or weight gain By Pharmacist Tips