In this video, a viewer asked about corresponding doses between
rosuvastatin (or generic Crestor) and pitavastatin (or generic Livalo) so I cover
that and then we go into some other statins. We just cover a summary on the
on comparison of statin dosages, then we talk about something that's interesting.
It's called half-life of a drug. It shouldn't take long.
The viewer was anniekate1914. "Dr. Brewer I am taking 2.5
2x a week of rosuvastatin. How much would I take of Livalo?" Well, "1
mg of Livalo is a very rough... (should have said roughly)...
roughly equivalent to 2.5 Crestor generic. However, don't expect to
take the Livalo 2x a week or especially once a week, like some do with
rosuvastatin. Livalo's half-life is only 12 hours compared to 17
for rosuvastatin. I'll do a quick video on it." So here's a statin dose
intensity and equivalence. See chart here. We have the high-intensity statins, the
moderate intensity. And here's how they define. A high-intensity statin is
something that lowers LDL equal to or greater than 50 %. As I've told you
before, I usually don't... I don't remember ever
going there... occasionally, I've had to do some moderate-intensity statins. But the
vast majority of time, I'm really just looking at low-intensity statins and
it's more for cardiovascular inflammation than it is for LDL. But then
when you go over here, you see this column is rosuvastatin. This one is
atorvastatin or Lipitor. Rosuvastatin is Crestor. Pitavastatin is
Livalo. Then you've got some others as well. Simvastatin, lovastatin, pravastatin,
fluvastatin. So when you get down into the low intensities, 5 mg of
rosuvastatin is the standard. These were way back so the prices
have changed significantly. I'm gonna skip over a Lipitor or atorvastatin for
reasons that I've mentioned. Many many times I don't use it so you come over
and look at the corresponding dosage for pitavastatin and then you see it's 1
mg so again 1 mg is the lower dose for lower-intensity
pitavastatin or Livalo. Now remember I mentioned half-life. What is half-life?
Well, to a lot of people, it's an old computer game.
I saw it once but I never really played it. But that's not what this is.
Half-life is often originally referred mostly to radioactivity. When something
had a radioactivity of X and a half-life of Y, then X would be half
depleted in Y time. Now that sounds kind of weird. Let's go down and look at this.
It's basically the amount of time that it takes for half of a drug. So
we're talking about the amount of time for half of that drug to be excreted. So
as you see, you don't tend to excrete a drug at a certain amount every
time. It's based on concentration. An image here that helps. See this. This is
the concentration of the drug and the half-life on this drug is 2 hours. So at
2 hours time, it's gone from 100 down to 50. At 4 hours time, it's gone from 50
down to 25. So this is another drug here. At time zero, it is at 20. And 1 hour
later, it's at 10. So again, hopefully, that helps you understand what half-life is.
Why does that matter? Well here's why. You know, the half-life for Crestor is 17
hours. That's why you're able to take Crestor twice a week or
three times a week or even it's been documented that once a week Crestor
actually does have a positive impact on cardiovascular inflammation.
You won't be able to do that with something that's got a half-life much
lower. So thank you very much for your interest.