I’ve lost count of the people I know who don’t have atherosclerosis, but were prescribed statins simply because their cholesterol was above the supposedly magic number of 200. Their doctors weren’t treating heart disease; they were treating a cholesterol score.
http://www.fathead-movie.com/index.php/2011/01/20/bad-news-for-statins-is-good-news/
A new meta-analysis of the effectiveness of statins (and lack thereof) was just released by the Cochrane Collaboration, and it’s bad news for the statin-makers — partly because the analysis itself isn’t flattering, and partly because the Cochrane Collaboration is a highly-respected organization whose work is considered both thorough and unbiased.
Pfizer claims Lipitor reduces the rate of heart attacks by 36%. As I’ve explained in previous posts, that figure may sound impressive, but basically it means that during the clinical trials, three out of every 100 men who took a placebo had a heart attack, while slightly less than two out of every 100 men who took Lipitor had a heart attack. So for every 100 men treated for ten years, we’re preventing (in theory) one heart attack. Even those unimpressive results were found only among with men with existing heart disease or multiple risk factors for heart disease — not among women, and not among otherwise healthy people who happen to have high cholesterol.
http://www.fathead-movie.com/index.php/2011/01/20/bad-news-for-statins-is-good-news/
A new meta-analysis of the effectiveness of statins (and lack thereof) was just released by the Cochrane Collaboration, and it’s bad news for the statin-makers — partly because the analysis itself isn’t flattering, and partly because the Cochrane Collaboration is a highly-respected organization whose work is considered both thorough and unbiased.
Pfizer claims Lipitor reduces the rate of heart attacks by 36%. As I’ve explained in previous posts, that figure may sound impressive, but basically it means that during the clinical trials, three out of every 100 men who took a placebo had a heart attack, while slightly less than two out of every 100 men who took Lipitor had a heart attack. So for every 100 men treated for ten years, we’re preventing (in theory) one heart attack. Even those unimpressive results were found only among with men with existing heart disease or multiple risk factors for heart disease — not among women, and not among otherwise healthy people who happen to have high cholesterol.
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