Sir Rory and Professor Sever are among the authors of a new review of the evidence, published earlier this month in The Lancet. This argues that patients and some doctors have been overly influenced by studies linking statins to muscle pains, when the gold standard of evidence, from randomised controlled trials, shows no such link. Launching the review on September 7, Sir Rory said he had complete confidence from the trial evidence that muscle pain was a rare consequence of taking statins.
Publication in The BMJ of two papers that made erroneous claims about the frequency of side effects of statins was a serious disservice to British and international medicine, far worse in the harm done than the MMR scare, he says.
In this high-stakes statins war, proponents battle for the moral high ground. The evidence of benefit may be clear, but many doctors baulk at the proposition that millions of healthy people should be prescribed drugs to protect against diseases they do not yet have and may never get.
Guidance from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) that anybody with a greater than 10 per cent risk of developing cardiovascular disease within the next ten years should be offered statins has been ignored by many GPs. “There should be no automatic prescribing based on slavish devotion to a simplistic mathematical model of risk,” according to Dr Andrew Green of the British Medical Association in October 2014.
No comments:
Post a Comment