Millions more people should be put on cholesterol-lowering statin drugs to protect them against heart attacks and strokes, according to draft guidelines for the NHS in England.
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence says the scope for offering this treatment should be widened to save more lives.
Death rates have been decreasing in recent years, but cardiovascular disease remains the leading UK killer.
It claims about 180,000 lives a year.
Currently, doctors are meant to offer statin tablets to the estimated seven million people who have a 20% chance of developing cardiovascular disease over 10 years, based on risk factors such as their age, sex, whether they smoke and what they weigh.
Too much cholesterol in your blood can lead to these fatty deposits. Statin drugs work by lowering cholesterol.
Eating a healthy diet, doing regular exercise and keeping slim will also help lower cholesterol.
Like all medicines, statins have potential side-effects.
They have been linked to muscle problems and liver and kidney problems, but only in a very small number of cases.
Prof Simon Maxwell of the British Pharmacological Society said: "Patients should be helped to make a truly informed decision about the benefits and risks of taking long-term preventative therapy that will not make them feel any better in the short-term.
More on this story here.
About one person in 50 is reckoned to benefit from taking statins, many people suffer serious side effects. Would NICE be pushing stains if they were very expensive ? not a chance. They are cheap drugs but when you have many millions taking them it adds up to $30 billion a year earner. Remember just as many people have heart attacks that have so called low cholesterol numbers. There is no correlation between cholesterol numbers and heart disease. Video from Dr. Malcolm Kendrick. Eddie
Edit. From the Telegraph 12 million will be told to take statins here.
Edit. From the Telegraph 12 million will be told to take statins here.
So, it's good to see NICE joining the dots and saying today that people with a low risk of heart problems (10% over 10 years - i.e. a 90% chance that they won't have a heart attack in ten years) should also be gobbling up statins. Because as everyone knows statins work to stop heart attacks! Except in the vast majority of patients where they don't.
ReplyDeleteAnd the NHS wonders why it is losing support from its core participants, the patients.
I'm looking forward to what Kendrick has to say about this
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/feb/12/cholesterol-drug-statins-offered-millions-more-nhs-guidance
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Dillinger
The Dillinger comment was copied and placed on this thread by me, from another thread. Dillinger is not a team member, although he would be most welcome any time.
ReplyDeleteEddie
Unfortunately, many side-effects of statines look like just the aging - body pains, memory problems, depression.
ReplyDeleteI do not often comment. I think this is bad, personally I would not take statins, they were prescribed I took them, the side effects muscle cramps were terrible. I no longer take them my GP was not happy but I am. From reports I have read they do not appear necessary.
ReplyDeleteI do like the different recipes and ideas you are posting.
Sheila
Money makes the world go around, at the misfortune of many.
ReplyDeleteJames
I'm happy to have my ramblings posted anywhere.
ReplyDeleteThe thing with statins is as this study shows they do a bit but not much.
For people who have not had a heart attack but have risk factors the use of statins reduced the number of people dying from 5.7% to 5.1% in the 2 groups (statins or placebo).
That is a 'significant' reduction not in the sense of 'big' (it's not it's f all) but in the sense that it is not random.
So, we know statins reduce cholesterol without doubt, but what does that do to your risk of dying; bugger all really.
These types of results in and off themselves demonstrate that cholesterol levels cannot be important for heart disease because it they were then the heart disease would drop as much as the cholesterol levels. But the take away message is; take more statins, younger for longer and all will be well (i.f you are one of those 6 people in a 1,000).
Yet the lunacy continues.
Here's the description;
During a mean follow-up of 4.1 years 5.7% (1925/33 793) of participants died in the control group compared with 5.1% (1725/33 683) in the statin group. Statin therapy was therefore associated with a 12% risk reduction in all cause mortality compared with the control (odds ratio 0.88, 95% confidence interval 0.81 to 0.96; fig 2⇓ and table 2⇓).
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Dillinger