Statins, drugs like zocor, lipitor and crestor, are wonderful at lowering your cholesterol, in effect reducing your risk of a heart attack. They are the most prescribed class of drugs in the world. But for some they do have painful side effects. Now the FDA has approved a pain free alternative.

With terribly high cholesterol running in her family, Joyce Kokes of Taylor needed statins. She tried a half dozen brands over the years but for the past three decades she suffered aches and pains, which she thought might be early arthritis. She says, “I just had terrible muscle pain to the point I couldn’t tolerate it anymore. Dr. Goswami had me go off it three months and my cholesterol went really high.”

Dr. Vivek Goswami, a cardiologist at the Heart Hospital of Austin, explains, “For years people who were statin intolerant really had no good options. There are other classifications of medicine that lower LDL cholesterol but they really haven’t been that effective.” Recently the FDA approved something new, called a Pcsk9 inhibitor. It is not a statin but it works. Dr. Goswami says, “It drops the LDL cholesterol, the bad cholesterol, rather dramatically and the side effects have been essentially non-existent to this day.”

You take the Pcsk9 inhibitor with a self administered shot every two weeks. At first that gave Joyce pause, but she tried it and says, “I was amazed at how simple it was. It’s just a  fifteen second injection and my LDL dropped from 206 to 62.”

Because it is fairly new, insurers are just now covering it, and Medicare does as well, but the doctor says a lot of people, patients and doctors, don’t know about it, “There’s certainly a learning curve for doctors to implement any type of new drug that comes to market.”

Joyce now has much lower cholesterol and better still she is pain free, explaining, “When I started the injections the pain symptoms were gone and they haven’t come back. It’s wonderful.”

Taking a deeper look, one in four Americans over the age of 45 take statins to control their cholesterol. It’s believed 10% to 20% will suffer side effects. Those include muscle pain, and on rare occasions memory loss, nausea, a rash and liver damage. You are more prone to those effects if you are a woman or drink to excess. Pregnant women should never take statins during their child bearing because they could increase the risk of birth defects.What others are clicking on: