McMaster University Researchers Discover Statins' Link To Diabetes

Researchers at McMaster University believe that they have found one of the pathways that link statins to diabetes. The researchers were led by Jonathan Schertzer, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences at McMaster University and a Canadian Diabetes Association Scholar. There are currently 13 million people taking statins, which are prescribed commonly by doctors to treat cardiovascular conditions.

In his research, Schertzer found that statins affected the immune system in a way that stops insulin from being effective. Over longer periods of time, this can cause diabetes. The team discovered however, that when statins are combined with Glyburide during treatment, the risk of developing diabetes dropped.

“Statins are among the most prescribed drugs in the world, and have been fantastic at reducing cardiovascular events,” said Schertzer. “But the side effects of statins can be far worse than not being able to eat grapefruit. Recently, an increased risk of diabetes has been added to the warning label for statin use. This was perplexing to us because if you are improving your metabolic profile with statins you should actually be decreasing the incidence of diabetes with these drugs; yet, the opposite happened.”

According to Schertzer, new strategies could potentially be developed for treatment once more research is conducted to find out more about the relationship between statins and diabetes. “With the new federal warning label on the risk of diabetes with statin usage, people are heavily debating its pros and cons. We think this is the wrong conversation to have. Statins are a great drug for many people. What we really should be talking about is how to make them better and we are beginning to understand the basic biology of statins so we can do just that,” Schertzer said.

In the future, the research team plans to investigate how statins work in the pancreas. It will also investigate if this newly discovered immune pathway contributes to other statin side effects, including muscle pain and muscle-breakdown.

The team’s research was published in the Diabetes medical journal with support from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Canadian Diabetes Association.