Tue, Mar-25-08, 09:10
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Experimenter
Posts: 25,861
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Plan: DDF
Stats: 202/185.4/179
BF:
Progress: 72%
Location: San Diego, CA
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Define mainstream.
There's been a whole series of articles about the uselessness of statins in mainstream, conservative publications like Business Week. Let me see if I can find some. They reference studies done by the NIH. You should be able to glean study authors or titles from the article and look for them on PubMed.
In the Real World, a Slew of Side Effects from Statins
Do Cholesterol Drugs Do Any Good?
Quote:
DOING THE MATH
The second crucial point is hiding in plain sight in Pfizer's own Lipitor newspaper ad. The dramatic 36% figure has an asterisk. Read the smaller type. It says: "That means in a large clinical study, 3% of patients taking a sugar pill or placebo had a heart attack compared to 2% of patients taking Lipitor."
Now do some simple math. The numbers in that sentence mean that for every 100 people in the trial, which lasted 3 1/3 years, three people on placebos and two people on Lipitor had heart attacks. The difference credited to the drug? One fewer heart attack per 100 people. So to spare one person a heart attack, 100 people had to take Lipitor for more than three years. The other 99 got no measurable benefit. Or to put it in terms of a little-known but useful statistic, the number needed to treat (or NNT) for one person to benefit is 100.
Compare that with, say, today's standard antibiotic therapy to eradicate ulcer-causing H. pylori stomach bacteria. The NNT is 1.1. Give the drugs to 11 people, and 10 will be cured.
A low NNT is the sort of effective response many patients expect from the drugs they take. When Wright and others explain to patients without prior heart disease that only 1 in 100 is likely to benefit from taking statins for years, most are astonished. Many, like Winn, choose to opt out.
Plus, there are reasons to believe the overall benefit for many patients is even less than what the NNT score of 100 suggests. That NNT was determined in an industry-sponsored trial using carefully selected patients with multiple risk factors, which include high blood pressure or smoking. In contrast, the only large clinical trial funded by the government, rather than companies, found no statistically significant benefit at all. And because clinical trials themselves suffer from potential biases, results claiming small benefits are always uncertain, says Dr. Nortin M. Hadler, professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a longtime drug industry critic. "Anything over an NNT of 50 is worse than a lottery ticket; there may be no winners," he argues. Several recent scientific papers peg the NNT for statins at 250 and up for lower-risk patients, even if they take it for five years or more. "What if you put 250 people in a room and told them they would each pay $1,000 a year for a drug they would have to take every day, that many would get diarrhea and muscle pain, and that 249 would have no benefit? And that they could do just as well by exercising? How many would take that?" asks drug industry critic Dr. Jerome R. Hoffman, professor of clinical medicine at the University of California at Los Angeles.
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Then there's all the Videos done by Malcom Kendrick on Youtube that reference various enormous studies like MONICA.
http://youtube.com/results?search_q...ck&search_type=
There's a ton of stuff at http://www.thincs.org/index.htm
Look at how many members are cardiologists: http://www.thincs.org/members.htm
And at that site, here's where a lot of the articles and studies are cataloged. http://www.thincs.org/news.htm |
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