Response to the "everyone over 50 should be on a statin story"

I have been alerted by a few people to a story emanating from the UK that everyone over the age of fifty should be prescribed statin drugs to prevent "thousands of heart attacks and strokes".

The story is about an analysis of some statin trials that apparently showed that as cholesterol levels were lowered then heart disease and stroke levels were decreased. The thrust of the argument by one of the researchers, professor Colin Baigent, is that whatever your cholesterol level, reducing it further is beneficial.  

As anyone who reads this blog will realise, lower cholesterol levels are NOT beneficial to health.

However for arguments sake lets pretend that statin trials are not paid for by the pharmaceutical companies that manufacture the statins.

Lets pretend that many of the statin trials are not conducted by personnel that have financial ties with the companies that manufacture the statins.

Lets pretend that the trials are not designed in such a way as to seriously skew the results to show statins in a favourable light.

Lets pretend that the researchers don't just accentuate the very minor positive aspects of statin drugs in the summaries of the trials, whilst completely ignoring the vast deleterious side-effects they cause.

After all that "lets pretending", lets examine figures from the British Heart Foundation statistics database and the World Health Organisation Global Health Atlas 2005.

In both graphs data was extracted from 86 countries.

Figure 1 shows that life expectancy increases quite sharply as cholesterol levels increase, and even the data regarding cardiovascular diseases in figure 2 shows that as cholesterol levels increase, then death rates from cardiovascular diseases decrease.

Lets stop pretending.

The hard data shows the opposite of what the pharmaceutical industry backed advisers tell us.

I suggest that as well as listening to advice about data gathered from "drug company industry paid for, drug company industry personnel conducted, drug company industry designed and drug company industry biased results" trials, people should conduct their own research and come to their own conclusions.

Who would you listen to and trust?

Professor Colin Baigent heads a university department which received funding from Merck Sharpe & Dohme Ltd; who just happen to be the pharmaceutical company linked to the parent company (Merck & Co) in the USA who first brought Lovastatin to market.

Would you trust someone who trots out figures that are backed by the $29 billion statin industry, or someone who just shows unbiased data of actual life expectancies, actual cardiovascular death rates and actual cholesterol levels?

If you would like another opinion of Baigent's study go to Dr Briffa's site here.