cholesterol lowering drugs


The advertisements for the cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor claim that it reduces heart attacks by 36% however, in small print,the ad notes “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.” Hi, this is Larry Hobbs @ fatnews.com. This according to the cover story in BusinessWeek from January 17th, 2008, “Do Cholesterol DrugsDo Any Good?” “So to spare one person a heart attack, 100 people had to takeLipitor for more than three years. The other 99 got no measurable benefit.” “In contrast, the only large clinical trial funded by the government, rather than companies, found no statistically significant benefit at all.” “Most people are taking something with no chance of benefit and a risk of harm,” says James Wright, MD. The story refers to an analysis by Dr. James M. Wright, Professor at the University of British Columbia and director of the Canadian government-funded Therapeutics Initiative, whose purpose is to analyze data on drugs and figure out how well they work. His contact information is listed at the end of this video. As far as I know niacin, vitamin B3, is the only cholesterol-lowering agent ever shown to reduce the risk of total mortality. Cholesterol-lowering drugs reduce the risk of dying from a heart attack but increase the risk of dying from cancer suicide and accidental death so that the overall risk of death is not reduced. When looking at the research on …