Statin drug Crestor damages kidneys of patients, says Public Citizen

It's yet more evidence of problems from statin drugs, which continue to be heavily promoted by drug companies and physicians, despite alarming safety concerns and a long list of toxic side effects.

• Twenty-nine patients who took AstraZeneca Plc's AZN.L AZN.N anti-cholesterol drug Crestor have developed kidney damage, a U.S. consumer group said on Friday as it called again for a ban on the medicine.
• The rate of reported kidney problems is about 75 times higher with Crestor than with all other drugs in the same class combined, consumer group Public Citizen said.
• According to its analysis, there have been 6.4 reports of acute kidney failure or kidney damage for every 1 million Crestor prescriptions filled.
• "It becomes clearer by the day that this drug is uniquely toxic without offering any unique benefit, and that it must be removed from the market," Dr. Sidney Wolfe, head of Public Citizen's Health Research Group, wrote in a letter to the Food and Drug Administration.
• AstraZeneca insists Crestor, known generically as rosuvastatin, is as safe as other drugs in the family known as statins.
• "Our data shows, with regard to that particular adverse event, (Crestor) remains in line with other statins," company spokeswoman Emily Denney said.
• AstraZeneca updates information about health problems reported in Crestor patients every week on its Web site www.rosuvastatininformation.com, Denney said.
• The "adverse event" reports often are incomplete and do not prove if a drug caused a particular problem, but the FDA uses them to look for signals of possible drug-induced hazards.
• According to the site, "serious" kidney problems are "very rare" and occur at a rate of less than one in 10,000.
• Millions of people worldwide take statins, such as Pfizer Inc.'s PFE.N Lipitor and Merck & Co Inc.'s MRK.N Zocor, to lower their cholesterol.
• High cholesterol is a major risk factor for heart disease.
• Bayer AG's BAYG.DE statin Baycol was pulled from the market in 2001 after it was linked to more than 100 deaths, many of them from a severe muscle-damaging condition called rhabdomyolysis.