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  #1   ^
Old Sat, Dec-08-18, 15:46
Demi's Avatar
Demi Demi is offline
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Plan: Muscle Centric
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Default Could our overuse of statins be the biggest health catastrophe of a generation?

Quote:
From The Telegraph
London, UK
8 December, 2018

Could our overuse of statins be the biggest health catastrophe of a generation?

Justin Smith


When they began to be prescribed in earnest in the mid Nineties, statins were regarded by many as miracle drugs. The cholesterol-lowering pills, intended to combat heart disease, marked a turning point in medicine from cure to prevention; it was presumed they would be an overwhelming force for good, saving millions of lives.

On Friday, a major study of 30,000 patients at high cardiovascular risk by Imperial College London (published in JAMA Network Open, an American Medical Association journal), ostensibly fitted this narrative, showing that doubling the dosage of statins for those who have already had a cardiovascular event could prevent an extra 12,000 heart attacks and strokes a year.

Yet what is also beginning to become ever more apparent, is what some in the medical community – and myself, as a researcher and filmmaker on the subject – have been arguing for years. That overuse of statins in those without a cardiovascular condition could in fact become the biggest health catastrophe of a generation.

Another authoritative study published last week is the latest in a growing body of evidence to suggest not just that statins may have been significantly overprescribed, but also that, for many, the risks of taking them as a preventative measure could outweigh their benefits.

The analysis, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, an American journal, examined the four most commonly prescribed statins using data from 40 previously published randomised clinical trials. Researchers found that statins were likely to provide benefits at a substantially higher health risk than expected, suggesting that the 10-year risk thresholds used in the current guidelines are set at a level that could be doing more harm than good.

Prominent voices who have questioned the current widespread use of statins include Sir Richard Thompson, the Queen’s former personal physician and past president of the Royal College of Physicians. In addition, the British Medical Journal has in recent years increasingly taken a position against the widespread use of statins.

But in spite of this mounting controversy, statins remain among the most commonly prescribed drugs in the world – and the UK is no exception.
In 2013 it was estimated seven million people were being prescribed the drugs in Britain (although the NHS claimed in 2017 that figure was actually four million). In any case, according to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidelines, some 12 million Brits would be eligible for a statin prescription.

The rise in so-called ‘health MoTs’ for adults over 40 in Britain has further increased the numbers being offered statins as primary means of prevention against heart disease. For many of us, it has become a choice we feel pressured into.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide, so it is understandable that health authorities have allocated huge resources over the last few decades to fight it.

Much of this effort has been based on the idea that one of the main causes of heart disease is cholesterol. As a result, cholesterol-lowering medications—the class of drugs called statins in particular—have become, by far, the most widely used intervention for the prevention of heart attacks.
The first set of cholesterol treatment guidelines were developed in the United States in 1988 and have been updated every few years since, leading to notable increases in the number of people deemed eligible.

In 2013 the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association published recommendations that, if followed, would lead to a doubling of the number of people who take statins in the UK and America. In fact, according to Professor John Ioannidis at Stanford University School of Medicine, those recommendations meant that well over 1 billion of the world’s population became eligible for statin treatment.

This advice was controversial not just because of the large increase in the number of potential patients, but also because the calculator used to assess an individual person’s risk for cardiovascular disease was found to overestimate the risk - placing some people into the statin eligibility group that in reality were unlikely to need them.

At the time, the British Medical Journal also published an article questioning potential conflicts of interest – half of the panelists responsible for the recommendations had disclosed current or recent ties to drugs companies, raising concerns over perceived, though unproven bias.

True enough, statins are big business. In 2017 the London-based research firm Visiongain said the global cholesterol-lowering industry is worth $19.2bn (£15bn) and is forecast to grow 4.9 per cent each year during the next five years. One statin, Lipitor, generated more than $13 billion in 2006 for the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer before it went off patent in 2011.

The new analysis published this week adds to our understanding in that it at least makes an attempt to factor into the equation that statins may do us harm. Studies have shownthat they can cause a range of health problems including muscle damage and weakness, memory issues, Type II diabetes and erectile dysfunction.

A study published in the journal Nature earlier this year also found that they inhibit the growth of some potentially useful bacteria in the gut, allowing other bacteria to flourish and become superbugs resistant to antibiotics.

There is, however, a long way to go before the full extent of statin side effects can be quantified properly.

Statin supporters often say the rate of side effects is very low, and that muscle pain, the most commonly reported side effect of statins, is imaginary. They refer to the nocebo effect (the opposite of a placebo): the idea that health problems from other causes are blamed on a prescribed medication because of a preconceived idea that the medication will cause them harm.

During the nine years that I have been closely following this debate – writing a book and directing and producing two documentary films on their effects - I have received hundreds of messages and emails from people who have been harmed by the drugs; many of whom are unfortunately still recovering years after stopping taking them.

What I have seen during the last few years in particular is that patients have lost respect for their doctor. They have often been ignored when they tried to voice their concerns, and I have received a number of accounts where people feel they have been bullied by a medical professional into taking statins. People have told me of their doctors being dismissive of the side effects, and blaming symptoms on simply getting old.

Other medical professionals seem blinkered by links between cholesterol and heart disease, ignoring other significant causes such as psychological and physical stress, nutritional imbalances and environmental factors such as pollution.

There are also a number of studies suggesting that statins, paradoxically, could be bad for the heart. It is already known that they block the production of a substance called coenzyme Q10; a critical component in the production of cellular energy and something that the heart, in particular, has high requirements for.

So, are statins overprescribed? Those in favour of their mass use often suggest that opponents to statins are on the fringe of medical opinion.
However, Prof Sherif Sultan, president of the International Society for Vascular Surgery, takes part in a debate about statins at the VEITH symposium in New York, each year. He strongly believes that statins should not be given to people who do not have a diagnosed heart problem – reducing their prescription by around 75 per cent.

Dr Rita Redberg, a cardiologist and professor of clinical medicine at the University of California in San Francisco, and editor-in-chief of JAMA Internal Medicine, has also questioned the use of statins for those of low risk, believing the harm may outweigh the risk for millions.

Debate rages on, while millions more prescriptions for statins are doled out. The one thing we can conclude for certain is that the evidence continues to stack up for an urgent independent review.




Justin Smith is the producer/director of two documentary films about statins; Statin Nation and Statin Nation II. He is also the author of the book, Statin Nation.




https://www.telegraph.co.uk/health-...phe-generation/
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  #2   ^
Old Sun, Dec-09-18, 09:58
GRB5111's Avatar
GRB5111 GRB5111 is offline
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Default

Glad to see the medical community is starting to question the successful conspiracy that has become statins. People like Redberg, Sultan, Ravnskov, and others who are bucking this dynamic of "conformance due to flawed 'authoritative' beliefs" must be heard.
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  #3   ^
Old Sun, Dec-09-18, 10:38
teaser's Avatar
teaser teaser is offline
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Default

Good points, but to the question, I'd answer "no." Statins have a lot of damage to do before they really compete with the humble twinkie and its ilk.
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  #4   ^
Old Wed, Dec-12-18, 06:13
JEY100's Avatar
JEY100 JEY100 is offline
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Zoe Harcombe picks apart the study that doubling statin dose would save lives:
https://inews.co.uk/opinion/statins...impression=true
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  #5   ^
Old Wed, Dec-12-18, 08:03
Squarecube's Avatar
Squarecube Squarecube is offline
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Oh my, thanks for posting this. What an awful study. I can see the day — perhaps with single payer health care — where we will be required to take statins to receive health care, based on so many of they rigged studies.
Grrrr
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  #6   ^
Old Thu, Dec-13-18, 09:56
WereBear's Avatar
WereBear WereBear is offline
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My answer would be YES, simply because the effects are so devastating.
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  #7   ^
Old Thu, Dec-13-18, 11:04
Nancy LC's Avatar
Nancy LC Nancy LC is offline
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Medical people really haven't learned that correlation is not causation. Back some decades ago they irradiated children with thymus glands they thought were enlarged (they weren't, they were just working on cadavers with undersized thymus glands) thinking they were saving the babies from SIDS. Anyway, the mistakes they make are based on some pretty lousy science and can affect so many lives tragically.

So, remain suspicious of medical assumptions and you might stay healthier.

https://helix.northwestern.edu/blog...ence-goes-wrong
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