* BlipsFit *

From our Saturday newspaper;

The conclusion of the article below is (in my opinion) that you should use statins only if you;

• have a cardiovascular disease AND
• high cholesterol AND
• are a men AND
  
• are younger then 70

Otherwise it might be a waist of money or even worse, because the use of statins could effect your health in a negative way. But as always decide for yourself, I’m so convinced that statins are not for me. Its a big scam that so many people are prescribed statins when they do not need them, only ” big pharma ” has some gain, they get the money while making you sick. Talk to your doctor? He might tell you different, I did not “talk” to my doctor but “told” him I would not take statins. He said “That is ok with me but then you have to make some drastic life changes.” Well I’m in the middle of that as you can read on this blog. And now please read and understand how “big pharma” makes their money.

(women never should use a statin)

Source: TwinCities.com (Pioneer Press)

Do statins prolong life?
For healthy patients, impact may be minimal

BY TARA PARKER-POPE
New York Times
Article Last Updated: 02/02/2008 07:18:51 PM CST

Statins are among the most prescribed drugs in the world, and there is no doubt that they work as advertised - that they lower not only cholesterol but also the risk for heart attack.

But in the fallout from the headline-making trial of Vytorin, a combination drug that was found to be no more effective than a simple statin in reducing arterial plaque, many people are asking a more fundamental question about statins in general: Do they prolong your life?

And for many users, the surprising answer appears to be no.

Some patients do receive significant benefits from statins, like Lipitor (from Pfizer), Crestor (AstraZeneca) and Pravachol (Bristol-Myers Squibb). In studies of middle-aged men with cardiovascular disease, statin users were less likely to die than those who were given a placebo.

But many statin users don’t have established heart disease; they simply have high cholesterol. For healthy men, for women with or without heart disease and for people over 70, there is little evidence, if any, that taking a statin will make a meaningful difference in how long they live.

“High-risk groups have a lot to gain,” said Dr. Mark Ebell, a professor at the University of Georgia who is deputy editor of the journal American Family Physician. “But patients at low risk benefit very little if at all. We end up overtreating a lot of patients.” (Like the other doctors quoted in this story, Ebell has no ties to drug makers.)

How is this possible, if statins lower the risk of heart attack?
Because preventing a heart attack is not the same thing as saving a life. In many statin studies that show lower heart attack risk, the same number of patients end up dying, whether they are taking

“You may have helped the heart, but you haven’t helped the patient,” said Dr. Beatrice Golomb, an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and a co-author of a 2004 editorial in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology questioning the data on statins. “You still have to look at the impact on the patient overall.”

A 2006 study in the Archives of Internal Medicine looked at seven trials of statin use in nearly 43,000 patients, mostly middle-aged men without heart disease. In that review, statins didn’t lower mortality.

Nor did they in a study called Prosper, published in the Lancet in 2002, which studied statin use in people 70 and older. Nor did they in a 2004 review in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which looked at 13 studies of nearly 20,000 women, both healthy and with established heart disease.

A Pfizer spokeswoman notes that a decline in heart disease death rates reported recently by the American Heart Association suggests that medications like statins are having an effect. But to consistently show a mortality benefit from statins in a research setting would take years of study. “We’ve concentrated on whether Lipitor reduces risk of heart attacks and strokes,” says Halit Bander, medical team leader for Lipitor. “We’ve proven that again and again.”

In January, the Journal of the American College of Cardiology published a report combining data from several studies of people 65 and older who had a prior heart attack or established heart disease. This “meta-analysis” showed that 18.7 percent of the placebo users died during the studies, compared with 15.6 percent of the statin users.

This translates into a 22 percent lower mortality risk for high-risk patients over 65. A co-author of the study, Dr. Jonathan Afilalo, a cardiology fellow at McGill University in Montreal, says that for every 28 patients over 65 with heart disease who take statins, one life will be saved.

“If a patient has had a heart attack,” Afilalo said, “they generally should be on a statin.”

Of course, prolonging life is not the only measure that matters. If preventing a heart attack improved the quality of life, that would be an argument for taking statins even if it didn’t reduce mortality. But critics say there’s no evidence that statin users have a better quality of life than other people.

“If you can show me one study that people who have a disability from their heart are worse off than people who have a disability from other causes, I would find that a compelling argument,” Golomb said. “There’s not a shred of evidence that you’ve mitigated suffering in the groups where there is not a mortality benefit.”

One big concern is that the side effects of statins haven’t been well studied. Reported side effects include muscle pain, cognitive problems and impotence.

“Statins have side effects that are underrated,” said Dr. Uffe Ravnskov, a retired Swedish physician and a vocal critic of statins. “It’s much more frequent and serious than has been reported.”

Ebell acknowledges that there are probably patients with heart disease who could benefit from a statin but who aren’t taking it.

But he added, “There are probably more of the opposite - patients who are taking a statin when they probably don’t need one.”

Two years ago my doctor prescribed me statins to lower my cholesterol. I asked him what the alternative would be and he said it needs a complete life change, eat better and exercise. Altough I did not take the statins, I did not do a life change either untill September 2007 nevertheless I’m so glad I never got on statins and will never do so either. If you are using statins you might want to read this and decide for yourself what to do.

One more thing before you start reading; I’m not saying that high LDL (bad cholesterol) is a good thing, but the way how to treat it and the levels doctors want you to have is up for discussion.

The hype about statin drugs is relentless these days. Physicians are urging patients to take statins even when they don’t have high cholesterol. The American Diabetes Association, for its part, ridiculously suggests that all diabetic patients should be on statins just in case scientists one day discover some benefit to diabetics. The hype surrounding statins is the con job of the decade, and statin manufacturers are laughing all the way to the bank. But all this begs the question: is there really any health benefit to taking statins? If so many doctors and drug companies are pushing this drug, it must be saving lives or improving peoples’ health, right?

Nope. A critical review of thirteen clinical trials, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, reveals some startling facts about statins:

• Statin drugs save zero lives.
• Statins are utterly useless as prevention.
• Even in people with high cholesterol, statins don’t reduce the risk of death one iota.
• There has never been a single study that demonstrated statins extend life for women.

So much for the hype surrounding statins. These pharmaceuticals are utterly useless, even for their intended patients. And yet they’re hyped up like some sort of miracle drug.

To make matters worse, statins actually cause an alarming assortment of side effects, including alterations in sex drive, nutritional deficiencies, muscular disorders, sudden death and widespread hormonal imbalances. Statins actually cause disease while preventing nothing! (That’s one reason why the FDA has already banned some statin drugs from the market.)

If statins are so bad for you, then how can modern medicine promote them so obediently? I’ve always been amazed at the chasm between modern medicine and real scientific thought. Modern medicine parades as science, but it’s really nothing more than a medical religion where anything is considered true if the right people say so. Scientific merit is thrown out the window. Simply put, drugs don’t have to be useful at all to be heralded as breakthrough pharmaceutical that will save tens of millions of lives. Even if the claim is a lie, it gets airtime, and both doctors and their patients buy into the lies.

The current hype about statins is a lie. These drugs are utterly useless and serve no purpose other than to extract billions of dollars in profits from the general public. Even people with high cholesterol don’t benefit from statins, the research now shows. But of course statin manufacturers don’t talk much about the real science. These studies are all swept under the rug. Why? Because they’d be interfering with a windfall scam: the great statin con of the 21st century!

SOURCE;
Medical fraud alert: cholesterol lowering statin drugs save zero lives, says comprehensive research published in JAMA

A more extensive article here; (From the place where I buy my vitamines and protein)

Considering that tens of millions of Americans now take statins to lower cholesterol, the following headline was conspicuously absent from the major media this month: “Statins Found to Turn On Gene that Causes Muscle Damage.” It’s now a fact of science; a new study shows that taking statins destroys your muscle to a greater or lesser degree. And let’s not forget that the heart is a muscle.

Place this study juxtaposed to another rather interesting recent finding: the more fit you are the longer you will live – and the two just don’t add up. How can you destroy muscle and be more fit? You can’t. Sure you can drug your cholesterol number lower, but will you be healthier, fit, and live longer? read more: www.newswithviews.com/Richards/byron44.htm

And if you still need more proof search for “statin scam” on google for a result of another 50.000 articles

LATEST UPDATE
Study Reveals Doubt on Drug for Cholesterol (The New York Times) Jan 15 2008

ANOTHER UPDATE

Over at Dr. Mike R. Eades MD website;

The Vytorin trial that finally came to light late last week kicked off the cascade of bad news. It appears that the combination of a statin and Zetia, despite lowering cholesterol levels by 40 percent more than a statin, was no more effective than the statin alone in preventing problems. Which would lead anyone with critical thinking skills to wonder about the hypothesis that LDL-cholesterol is really a problem.

www.proteinpower.com/drmike/page/2/