A main steam news article talks about absolute risk reduction, this is almost unheard of!
So here's what the Jupiter trial showed, if you have an elevated CRP and have 1 risk factor for heart disease (what we formerly called "low risk") and you take Crestor for 2 years you might be the one person out of 500 taking the pill that had a heart attack prevented. Doesn't that sound less glamourous than "50% reduction"?
The problem with that, among many, is that statins in general seem to raise the diabetes rate. This was shown in the Jupiter trial but that study was pretty short-lived. Other studies of statins show that taking the pill for 4 years will give you the chance of being the one person out of 250 that gets diabetes from taking the pill. Now maybe Crestor is a little lower or a little higher (it IS more potent that other statins so it's probably worse than 1 in 250 but no proof on that yet).
And this is just interesting with all the Vitamin D tests we're ordering now.
Again this all boils down to a highly lucrative experiment. We have no idea what taking Crestor for 3 years , 4 years or 20 years does to someone with a low risk of heart attacks. It's kind of despicable for a study that's supposed to be about heart attack prevention in relatively young healthy people to just run for 2 years. But it's par for the course.
It's really amazing to see the media talking about the down sides to these fads. The world is a changing my friends.
No comments:
Post a Comment