However, a recent cohort study carried out by researchers from the Peking Union Medical College Hospital, Beijing, China, Harvard Medical School, Bringham Women’s Hospital, and the Baim Institute for Clinical Research, Boston, Massachusetts, analysed the continuation of statin prescriptions in patients who had experienced side effects. [3] Of the 28,266 people included in the study, 70.7 per cent continued to receive statin therapy after reporting an adverse event. Four years on, and the rate of CV events was 12.2 per cent in those who continued with statin therapy verses 13.9 per cent in those who did not. [3]
This debate has been ongoing for a long time, and although the value of statins should not be in doubt, there is another side to the coin and legitimate questions do need answering. Some of these were outlined by Fiona Godlee, editor-in-chief of the British Medical Journal in 2016 in her letter ‘Lessons from the controversy over statins’ that was published in The Lancet. [4] These include:
- How large is the benefit of statin therapy for those at the lowest risk of heart disease?
- Does the evidence represent different patient populations – such as women – adequately?
- What is the impact of statin therapy on the patient’s lifestyle? Does it cause them to adopt more heathy behaviours, or the opposite?
- Do we need to examine the potential harm of statin therapy to ‘balance the books’?
It is worth noting that these questions are a far cry from the ‘statin denialism’ movement that shuns cholesterol-lowering therapy in favour of untested ‘natural’ remedies.
No comments:
Post a Comment