Zocor Side Effects Come To Light As Effectiveness Is Questioned

Zocor is a drug given to patients to reduce cholesterol levels.  Its generic version is called simvastatin and there’s also a drug called Vytorin that contains Zocor.  Patients who took 80mg levels of Zocor and developed rhabdomyolysis are now beginning to engage in lawsuits with Zocor’s parent company, Merck & Co. Public Citizen, a prominent consumer group, has placed the Zocor 80 mg doses on its “Do Not Use” list, following an FDA warning about the risk of serious and potentially life-threatening muscle damage from Zocor that was issued earlier this week. However, instead of issuing a Zocor recall for the 80 mg dose, the FDA allowed doctors to continue prescribe the medication to patients at the highest dose as long as they had taken it for at least a year without ill effects.

Zocor (simvastatin) is a synthetic statin developed by Merck & Co., which is also widely available
as generic simvastatin. Before patent protections expired in 2005, it was Merck’s best-selling drug and the second best-selling cholesterol lowering drug in the world, bringing in $4.3 billion in 2005. In 2010 alone, the FDA says that over 2.1 million Americans were given a prescription for the 80mg high-dose Zocor treatment. This is the same high-dose Zocor prescription the FDA and the research team found dangerous because of the link to Zocor side effects that include cardiomyopathy, kidney failure, muscle damage, myopathy, heart attack, rhabdomyolysis, congestive heart failure, and diabetes.

Since their discovery in the 1980s, statins have had kind of an on-again, off-again reputation as miracle drugs. They can definitely reduce the risk of a heart attack, especially for people who already have heart disease. If you’ve already had a heart attack, they can cut your risk of another attack by about one third. But heart disease is complicated, and no single drug can protect a person. A recent two-year study found that treating heart attack patients early and aggressively with statins reduced the risk of further heart trouble, but nearly 15% of patients still suffered another heart attack, had to be readmitted to the hospital, or died before the study was over.