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Message: <blockquote data-quote="NicoleC1971" data-source="post: 2370059" data-attributes="member: 365308">My question would be why do you want to lower your cholesterol?Your diabetic blood sugars are what is damaging your arteries and insulin can further encourage an inflammatory response in your body.A better strategy may be reducing your insulin resistance as much as possible so that you can reduce insulin.  I appreciate that being on steroids can make this tricky but hopefully you are not taking these meds permanently either?As discussed above you can see how insulin resistant you are by looking at markers such as high trig/low hdl levels (see your blood lipid panel results), high blood pressure and gaining fat around your middle.Ultimately you can quickly reduce your ldl cholesterol by taking a statin but my point is that doing so wont' necessarily reduce your risk of having a heart attack or stroke or even make you live any longer but you will get 'good' numbers on the panel and be congratulated by your nurse or doctor.Dr Malcolm McKendrick or Ivor Cummins both discuss these issues at length as does Dr  Asseem Malhotra (cardiologist) so its worth getting an alternative view.To illustrate this my current hba1c is  worse (at 64) and I know I need to work on this (type 1 so its tricky) and my cholestrol level is 7.8 but my BP is normal, I am not overweight and my triglycerides are 0.7 with an hdl of 2.7.   So I am pretty concerned about the hba1c but much less concerned about my cholesterol and it was frustrating to be told by the nurse in parrot like fashion 'taking a statin will half your risk of heart disease if you're diabetic'.   I've yet see data that supports this claim.</blockquote>

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