Dr Amir Khan

I don't have a problem with that.

It's not bequast, no.

That's amazing.

So statins are a medication we offer people to lower their cholesterol and therefore their risk of having a heart attack and stroke.

I must say, Cherry, that statins are probably the...

the most talked about in a controversial way, medication that I prescribe.

And even when I offer it to patients, they've got this idea in their head that statins are bad and they have loads of side effects and they shouldn't take them.

And they really resist going on statins.

Let me just explain how they work, first of all.

So there's lots of different types of statins, but the most common one we will prescribe now is something called atorvastatin.

As I said earlier, cholesterol is made in the liver.

What the statins do, they work in a number of ways.

So they block one of the enzymes that's involved in the liver production of cholesterol.

So it reduces its output of cholesterol.

Now, when the liver reduces its output of cholesterol, it does something quite, I think, quite magical.

It increases its receptors, which are like little nets on the surface for these bad LDLs, these harmful low-density lipoproteins.

So it then takes those LDLs out of your blood and processes them and excretes them.

So not only are you, as a result of your statin, producing less cholesterol, you're actually taking more of those bad LDLs out of your blood.

Now, the magic doesn't stop there with statins.

So remember I also said to you, you know, your immune system goes up to a fatty plaque and it tries to get rid of it and that can loosen it and make it go off somewhere.