Statin Meds: Yet Another MD promoting statins

Yet another British MD/researcher is promoting the administration of statin drugs (Atorvastatin) for ALL of us over 50 citing results of a massive British study (of which he was the author).

Interestingly, my GP keeps foising Lipitor on me and I have been storing it for the past year without taking a single pill.... he just keeps telling me how wonderful my LDL is! Sic.

I wonder, in our community here, if ANYONE has come across a legitimate study indicating that the use of statins is of benefit? Inquiring minds want to know.

Have a great weekend.

Murray L

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tikosyn uptake Dec 2011 500ug b.i.d. NSR since!
Herein lies opinion, not professional advice, which all are well advised to seek.

Murray - you asked about studies showing benefits of statins… Here are several posts from the archives….


Here is a post link to a Feb 2007 teleconference review with John Abramson, MD, Harvard Medical Faculty, and author of Overdo$ed America… Read the whole review to get an idea of why the majority of studies are often not representative of the truth….statins just one example.

......."The book, Overdo$ed America The Broken Promise of American Medicine (Harper Collins Sept 2004) was written by John Abramson, MD, a Family Practice physician who left his practice to go public to create awareness among healthcare consumers and his own medical profession that the drug companies are funding and manipulating data so that the truth about clinical trials or study results is often obscure and the safety of the public is in jeopardy. What he reveals about his findings is appalling and irrefutable because its right there if one has access and digs deeply enough.

On statins, Dr. Abramson observes,

Now, there are three groups of people men under 65, women under 65 and people over 65. For men, there are shades of gray. Very high risk men get some benefit from statins not as much as they would get from, exercise, nutrition, quitting smoking and controlling stress but there is some benefit. But for women, there is not a single randomized controlled study on file that shows that women who do not have heart disease or diabetes benefit from taking a cholesterol lowering drug. Not a one. And yet millions of American women are on these drugs.

Similarly, for people over 65, there is not a single randomized, controlled trial that shows that people over 65 who don’t have heart disease or diabetes would benefit from taking a statin drug. In fact, the one study that does address older people the PROSPER study, published in Lancet in 2002, looked at people over age 70 an equal mix of men and women and equal mix of primary and secondary prevention meaning people who did not yet have heart disease and those who already had heart disease and for the primary prevention patients (who don’t have heart disease), statins were not beneficial they did not reduce the incidence of cardiovascular disease or death but statins did increase the risk of cancer by 25% in an older population. So to be recommending statins and we’ve all heard the phrase, statins should be put in the water they are so good for people over 65 who do not have heart disease when we don’t have a randomized control study that shows it’s beneficial and we have a drug-company-sponsored trial that shows that the risk of cancer goes up by 25% in an older population, it makes no sense."
[www.afibbers.org]


Awareness post:

I’ve previously published similar information here. My local paper reported yesterday as a result of
an article published 8/5/09 in the NYTimes.

Just remember when we clamor for looking at ‘studies’ and especially if they are relatively new – like in the past 10 years or so,
these ghost writings may be present and the results of the studies may not reflect the truth, but rather bias toward whomever
sponsored the study. Well known medical researcher and diabetes expert, Ron Rosedale, MD, states that studies are only published (and paid for) by drug companies looking to have a marketing tool for their drug or apparatus. If there are unfavorable results in the study, those results will not be made public.
[www.nytimes.com]


2009 -

Harvard Medical School Finally Concerned About Drug Company Influence On Campus
A fascinating article in the New York Times last week told the story of Matt Zerden, a student at Harvard Medical School who was troubled when he heard his pharmacology professor repeatedly promote the benefits of cholesterol drugs and seemed to belittle a student who asked about side effects. [www.nytimes.com]

Mr. Zerden later discovered that the professor, a full-time member of the Harvard Medical faculty, was also a paid consultant to ten different drug companies, including five makers of cholesterol treatments. “I felt really violated,” Zerden says. “Here we have 160 open minds trying to learn the basics in a protected space, and the information he was giving wasn’t as pure as I think it should be.”

Now more than 200 Harvard Medical School students and sympathetic faculty are trying to expose and curtail pharmaceutical industry influence in their classrooms and laboratories, as well as in Harvard’s seventeen affiliated teaching hospitals and institutes. They say they are concerned that the same money that helped build the school’s world-class status may in fact be hurting its reputation and affecting its teaching.

The American Medical Student Association, a national group that rates how well medical schools monitor and control drug industry money, recently graded Harvard an F for their lax approach. Harvard Medical School’s peers received much higher grades. The University of Pennsylvania received an A; Stanford, Columbia and New York University received Bs, while Yale was awarded a C.

The school’s dean, Dr. Jeffrey S. Flier says he wants Harvard to catch up with the best practices at other leading medical schools. He recently announced a nineteen-member committee to re-examine his school’s conflict-of-interest policies.

Harvard students have already secured a requirement that all professors and lecturers disclose their industry ties in class—a blanket policy that has been adopted by no other leading medical school. Shockingly, one Harvard professor’s disclosure in class listed no less than forty-seven pharmaceutical company affiliations. About 1,600 of the school’s 8,900 professors and lecturers have reported to the dean that they or a family member had a financial interest in a business related to their teaching, research, or clinical care. The reports show 149 with financial ties to Pfizer and 130 with Merck.

The students say they worry that pharmaceutical industry scandals in recent years—including some criminal convictions, billions of dollars in fines, proof of bias in research and publishing, and false marketing claims—have cast a bad light on the medical profession. And they criticize Harvard as being less vigilant than other leading medical schools in monitoring potential financial conflicts by faculty members.

It’s difficult to be vigilant when Harvard creates three chairs with an $8 million endowment from sleep research companies; establishes faculty prizes like the $50,000 award named after Bristol-Myers Squibb; and accepts sponsorships like Pfizer’s $1 million annual subsidy for twenty new MDs in a two-year program to learn clinical investigation and pursue Harvard Master of Medical Science degrees, including classes taught by Pfizer scientists.

Merck built a corporate research center in 2004 across the street from Harvard’s own big new medical research and class building. And Merck underwrites other work on the Harvard campus, including an immunology lab.

But Dr. Marcia Angell, a faculty member and former editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, is among the professors who argue that industry profit motives are at odds with the scientific aims of academic medicine and that much of the financing needs to be not only disclosed, but banned. Too many medical schools, she says, have struck a “Faustian bargain” with pharmaceutical companies.

“If a school like Harvard can’t behave itself,” Dr. Angell said, “who can?” March 10, 2009 - Published in Pulse of Health Freedom

Erling posted this on 3/21/12

Marcia Angell, MD.
The Truth About the Drug Companies
How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It [www.amazon.com]

Book Description
Publication Date: August 9, 2005

During her two decades at The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Marcia Angell had a front-row seat on the appalling spectacle of the pharmaceutical industry. She watched drug companies stray from their original mission of discovering and manufacturing useful drugs and instead become vast marketing machines with unprecedented control over their own fortunes. She saw them gain nearly limitless influence over medical research, education, and how doctors do their jobs. She sympathized as the American public, particularly the elderly, struggled and increasingly failed to meet spiraling prescription drug prices. Now, in this bold, hard-hitting new book, Dr. Angell exposes the shocking truth of what the pharmaceutical industry has become–and argues for essential, long-overdue change.

Currently Americans spend a staggering $200 billion each year on prescription drugs. As Dr. Angell powerfully demonstrates, claims that high drug prices are necessary to fund research and development are unfounded: The truth is that drug companies funnel the bulk of their resources into the marketing of products of dubious benefit. Meanwhile, as profits soar, the companies brazenly use their wealth and power to push their agenda through Congress, the FDA, and academic medical centers.

Zeroing in on hugely successful drugs like AZT (the first drug to treat HIV/AIDS), Taxol (the best-selling cancer drug in history), and the blockbuster allergy drug Claritin, Dr. Angell demonstrates exactly how new products are brought to market. Drug companies, she shows, routinely rely on publicly funded institutions for their basic research; they rig clinical trials to make their products look better than they are; and they use their legions of lawyers to stretch out government-granted exclusive marketing rights for years. They also flood the market with copycat drugs that cost a lot more than the drugs they mimic but are no more effective.

The American pharmaceutical industry needs to be saved, mainly from itself, and Dr. Angell proposes a program of vital reforms, which includes restoring impartiality to clinical research and severing the ties between drug companies and medical education. Written with fierce passion and substantiated with in-depth research, The Truth About the Drug Companies is a searing indictment of an industry that has spun out of control.
[www.afibbers.org]

Ghostwriters Used in Vioxx Studies, Article Says
[www.irbforum.org]

.

Jackie: As fast as the research on cardiovascular issues is progressing, the 2004 study you reference above is pretty much out of date. The other articles you mention are more related to big bad pharma in general than statin benefits or lack thereof specifically.

Here's a pointer to a very recent study in the NEJM by an author with no bigpharma ties that indicates there are lower mortality benefits from judicious statin use without significant increase in diabetes. She is rebutting a UCSF study with a different conclusion.

[www.nejm.org]

Gordon

Thanks Gordon – in Integrative/Functional Medicine circles… the opinions are still the same… very few, if any people benefit from taking statins.

Here are two current references that are informative…

Cholesterol Lowering, Cardiovascular Diseases,
and the Rosuvastatin-JUPITER Controversy
A Critical Reappraisal
Michel de Lorgeril, MD; Patricia Salen, BSc; John Abramson, MD; Sylvie Dodin, MD; Tomohito Hamazaki, PhD;
Willy Kostucki, MD; Harumi Okuyama, PhD; Bruno Pavy, MD; Mikael Rabaeus, MD
Arch Intern Med. 2010;170(12):1032-1036

Background: Among the recently reported cholesterollowering
drug trials, the JUPITER ( Justification for the
Use of Statins in Primary Prevention) trial is unique: it
reports a substantial decrease in the risk of cardiovascular
diseases among patients without coronary heart disease
and with normal or low cholesterol levels.

Conclusion: The results of the trial do not support the
use of statin treatment for primary prevention of cardiovascular
diseases and raise troubling questions concerning
the role of commercial sponsors.

Introduction

THE RESULTS OF RECENT Cholesterol-
lowering drug trials
on decreasing morbidity and
mortality among persons
with or without coronary
heart disease (CHD) have been consistently
negative.1-9

However, there is one
exception, the JUPITER (Justification for
the Use of Statins in Primary Prevention)
trial,10 which showed—in primary prevention—
a striking decrease in CHD complications.

The JUPITER trial rapidly provoked
controversy11-13 regarding both the
results and the methods used in the trial.
Although enthusiastic comments have
been published,14-17 and the results have
undoubtedly propelled many healthy persons
without elevated cholesterol levels onto
long-term statin treatment, the clinical relevance
of the JUPITER trial remains in question.
(53 study references)


Do statins have a role in primary prevention?
An update.

Therapeutics Initiate Letter – March-April 2010
Evidence-based Drug Therapy

Conclusions
• Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are challenging
and require much more than locating RCTs and
plugging in the numbers.

• The claimed mortality benefit of statins for primary
prevention is more likely a measure of bias than a real
effect.

• The reduction in major CHD serious adverse events
with statins as compared to placebo is not reflected in a

[ti.ubc.ca]
(The references are worth noting).


Dr. Abramson is quoted in the LA Times for a report written in 2010…

He says: “Today, a majority of people who use statins are doing so for primary prevention of heart attacks and strokes. It is this use of statins that has come under recent attack.
"There's a conspiracy of false hope," says Harvard Medical School's Dr. John Abramson, who has cowritten several critiques of statins' rise, including one published in June in the Archives of Internal Medicine. "The public wants an easy way to prevent heart disease, doctors want to reduce their patients' risk of heart disease and drug companies want to maximize the number of people taking their pills to boost their sales and profits." [www.latimes.com]


For those who don’t enjoy wading through clinical studies, here are some current summary reports by Dr. Mercola (who is in the awareness spotlight these days) that offers a less technical overview of the ‘benefits’ or lack thereof of statins…

Are you taking any of these 11 dangerous cholesterol drugs?
[articles.mercola.com]

Newest Scam to Increase Drugs if You’re Over 50
[articles.mercola.com]

Stephen Sinatra MD on Cholesterol and Statins
[articles.mercola.com]

FDA demands new warning on statins
[articles.mercola.com]

Dr. Stephanie Seneff Talks about Statin Side Effects
[articles.mercola.com]

Jackie, et. al.
Thank you for the awesome posts. I will be kept busy for a while. Got hooked up on a PACE loop cardiography monitor today. I push the button whenever I feel a twinge and transmit via telephone line to the cardiology center at Southlake for inspection. They get a two minute strip; one minute prior to the EVENT button push and one minute after the push. The monitor will store up to 30 events (i.e. an hour or more) of ECG before you MUST transmit via landline. Suggested they include a link for packet transmission via a WiFi hotspot, etc.... food for thought. As you may have read, I am looking for 30 seconds of aFib, give or take, in order to enter the CABANA study. My last recorded aFib was in December 2011 and although I may have had a few breakthroughs, they were short-lived and without record.

Thanks again for the references regarding statins.

Murray L

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tikosyn uptake Dec 2011 500ug b.i.d. NSR since!
Herein lies opinion, not professional advice, which all are well advised to seek.