I’ve cut and pasted an email from Health After 50, a free newsletter from Scientific American.  My first thought was dig deeper.  The uninformed masses might take this information to their physician and start creating demand for these drugs.  Would you be surprised that the cost could be as high as $1000.00 per month?

PCSK9 Inhibitors: The Needle, the Cost, the Barriers | Medpage Today

There are still some highly effective generic statins where $10.00 buys you a 90 day supply.  There are OTC options to help with muscle pain and cramps.  You have to ask what good will these new drugs do if no one can afford them?

God Bless America.  We now have PCSK9 (proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin 9) inhibitors.

The Promising Alternative to Statins

Every so often medication comes along that sends the world of medicine’s collective heart aflutter. Cholesterol-lowering newcomers alirocumab (Praluent) and evolocumab (Repatha) are the current favorites.

Both medications are part of a new class of drugs called PCSK9 inhibitors. As the “inhibitor” in the name implies, these drugs work by inhibiting proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin 9, a protein that makes it more difficult for the liver to remove cholesterol. By blocking this substance, the medication is able to lower the LDL cholesterol circulating in the blood. In clinical trials, PCSK9 inhibitors have been shown to lower LDL levels significantly beyond what can be achieved with statin drugs, which have been the standard cholesterol-lowering therapy for more than two decades. And they did so without the most common side effect of statins: muscle pain.