Since then, confirmation of their results has come in thick and fast, strongly implicating most of the statins in CoQ10 depletion. Italian physicians found that simvastatin caused a 20 per cent reduction in blood CoQ10 levels (Int J Clin Lab Res, 1994; 24: 171-6), and similar results were obtained by Russian doctors using cerivastatin (Bull Exp Biol Med, 2002; 134: 39-42). French physicians achieved the same results with all the statins they prescribed (Br J Clin Pharmacol, 1996; 42: 333-7).

So, all of this suggests that Langsjoen’s once heretical idea that statins cause heart failure may well be on its way towards becoming established fact. The logic seems clear: if statins deplete CoQ10, and low levels of CoQ10 are associated with CHF, then statins may be a causal factor in CHF.

In a crowning irony, Merck (which manufactures simvastatin, marketed as Zocor) has filed a patent proposing to add CoQ10 to its formulation - a tacit acknowledgement of the core problem with these drugs.

Nevertheless, the widespread use of statins increases unabatedly, with over a million prescriptions a month in the UK alone - a 10-fold increase in less than a decade.

Nearly three years ago, 14 experts from across the globe, most of them professors of medicine, signed an open letter (dated 5 September, 2001) to the US Food and Drug Administration, the supreme American health authority. In this communication, they pointed out the dangers of statins and pleaded: 'It is urgently incumbent upon the scientific community . . . and the regulatory bodies to be certain that we are not inadvertently creating a life-threatening deficiency . . . in many millions of patients.'

Since then, however, regulatory bodies have done nothing. The silence has been deafening.

The mercury connection Besides statins, what other factors might lie behind the CHF epidemic? Groundbreaking research from Italy says one major environmental cause could be dental amalgam fillings. Researchers at the Catholic University in Rome have tested patients with advanced CHF and found a 'marked elevation' of mercury in the heart tissue - in the order of a massive 22,000 times higher than normal. None of these patients worked or lived in areas that would have exposed them to mercury, so the source of this toxin in their bodies must have been the silver-mercury amalgam fillings in their mouths.

Interestingly, most of the mercury was concentrated in the heart, with very little found elsewhere in the body. Quite why this happens is not known, but the researchers speculate that the mercury can 'adversely affect . . . heart metabolism and worsen cellular function' (J Am Coll Cardiol, 1999; 33: 1578-83).

That mercury is a major poison has been known for more than a century, but dentists have always claimed that, when chemically amalgamated with silver, it becomes harmless. But, in the last 20 years, this view has been seriously called into question as study after study has shown that amalgam fillings leach mercury into the body, mainly through mercury vaporisation while chewing.

Dentists have been forced to retreat to a fall-back position in which they now admit that fillings do give off mercury, but at such low levels that they’re non-toxic. However, this convenient side-step appears to have been scuppered by the new Italian research demonstrating that mercury is not harmlessly distributed throughout the body, but accumulates into potential killer loads in the heart.