My doctor has just prescribed 40mg of Lovastatin/day to be taken at my evening meal. When I picked up the prescription the bottle had a warning not to eat or drink grapefruit while on this med. The enclosed leaflet said to limit grapefruit to 1 quart per day.
I generally have 1/2 grapefruit for breakfast daily. Is this going to be a problem?
Grapefruit is not a good idea, as it can effect the meds. There are alot of meds. that are not good to mix with grapefruit, and statins are one of them.
It takes a lot of grapefruit to cause a problem and a half fruit a day will certainly be ok with any ststin. The warning is against drinking large amounts of juice.
Thank you all for your comments. After posting my question I called four pharmacists and asked their opinion. All four told me to avoid grapefruit in any quantity. So just to be safe, I guess I'll do so. Oh, how I'll miss it!
The serendipitous discovery in 1991 of the interaction of grapefruit juice with drugs occurred when grapefruit juice was used to mask the taste of ethanol in a study testing an interaction between the dihydropyridine calcium channel blocker felodipine and ethanol.1 It is now known that grapefruit juice can interact with a number of drugs, the basis of the interaction being the local inhibition of one of the cytochrome P450 enzymes (CYP3A4) and P-glycoprotein (Pgp) in enterocytes in the intestinal wall.2 It has been shown that grapefruit juice does not affect hepatic CYP3A4. Significant interactions have also been found for some of the HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors (statins), particularly simvastatin but possibly also atorvastatin; the benzodiazepines midazolam and triazolam; as well as cyclosporin, saquinavir, and cisapride. This is not an exhaustive list and there are a number of other drugs with a potential for interaction which have not been studied
