Statins have saved the lives of millions of people by helping to lower the amount of bad LDL cholesterol in their blood. Statins do this by restricting the amount of cholesterol made by the liver.
Now there’s a second approach to treating high cholesterol: a new class of drugs called cholesterol absorption inhibitors. They work by preventing the intestine from absorbing cholesterol consumed in foods and produced by the liver. In the process, these drugs lower both LDL cholesterol and triglycerides. To date, the only drug in this class approved by the Food and Drug Administration is ezetimibe (Zetia). Other cholesterol absorption inhibitors are in various stages of testing.
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Ezetimibe was developed as a complementary drug to statins. Adding ezetimibe to statin therapy can quickly boost the LDL reduction achieved by statin therapy an additional 20 percent. This makes ezetimibe an ideal choice when statins alone do not lower LDL to sufficiently low levels to protect the heart.
Pill taking has been made easier with a single tablet called Vytorin, which combines ezetimibe with simvastatin (Zocor).Vytorin delivers a double whammy to cholesterol by attacking it on both the liver and intestinal fronts. However, the same powerful effect can be achieved by taking ezetimibe and another statin as two separate pills.
Increasingly, ezetimibe is used as an alternative for people who cannot tolerate statins. Alone, it lowers LDL cholesterol an average of 18 percent. Like all medications, ezetimibe has some side effects, but fewer patients report serious side effects from ezetimibe than from statins.
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