Elsevier

Atherosclerosis

Volume 218, Issue 1, September 2011, Pages 247-249
Atherosclerosis

Letter to the Editor
A comparison of 25-hydroxyvitamin D serum levels among those with or without statin-associated myalgias

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.atherosclerosis.2011.04.037Get rights and content

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Results

Overall, 129 patients met study criteria. Fifty-seven of these patients were considered (+) SAM while 72 were (−) SAM. Differences between study groups were minimal (Table 1). An important characteristic of the (+) SAM group was the previous number of statins which resulted in musculoskeletal complaints (median 3; range of 1–6), indicating most failed multiple statins.

When analyzing serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D values we found no differences between groups. The mean serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D

Discussion

Among patients in our lipid-specialty clinic, we found that serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels do not differ among patients with a recent and often extensive history of SAM and those currently free of myalgias and receiving statin therapy.

It is intuitive that an association between low serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels and SAM is plausible in some patients, considering myalgias or muscle weakness are major manifestations of low vitamin D levels. However, our data does not support this association.

Conclusion

In our lipid-specialty clinic we found that serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels do not differ between patients with a recent and generally extensive history of SAM and those currently asymptomatic and receiving statin therapy. Overall our findings suggest that hypovitaminosis D is not likely to be the underlying etiology in patients with a history of SAM from multiple statins.

This research has not been presented elsewhere.

Conflict of interest

All authors report no conflict of interest as related to this work.

References (3)

There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

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    Kurnik and colleagues contended in their review that differences in these two demographics may account for their conflicting results from previously published literature. Backes and colleagues had a very similar design and methodology to our study, yet found no difference in vitamin D concentrations between groups [16]. The high prevalence of African American patients in our study may account for some degree of variability in findings.

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    This meta-analysis is hypothesis generating, and RCTs investigating the effect of vit D supplementation on the frequency and severity of statin-associated myalgia should be performed in order to test the validity of this association. In some available studies, low serum concentrations of 25-hydroxyvitamin D (≤ 20 ng/mL) have been associated with myalgia and reduced muscle function [33–40]. Ahmed et al. [21] reported that 128 statin-treated patients with myalgia had significantly lower mean serum vit D level than 493 asymptomatic patients (28.6 ± 13.2 vs 34.2 ± 13.8 ng/mL).

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