statin research misinformation

[Philip Blair]

I monitor a group of distinguished researchers and and writers who have submitted letters to the editors of 27 journals regarding statin drug misinformation, I have attached the full letter and list server dialog for more information. I know that you cannot tell patients not to use statins but you can recognize adverse effects and encourage patients to return to their providers to rectify that problem. Statins do not stop or reverse astherosclerosis in studies, in fact quite the contrary, in some studies they promoted ASCVD, but did not increase cardiac events.

Here is the key paragraphs:

As many cardiovascular events may heal with minimal sequela or
none at all, we consider mortality as the most important outcome.
In the CCT paper the authors claim that the result was a 12%
reduction in coronary mortality. However, according to webfigure
6 in the appendix
<https://www.thelancet.com/cms/10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31942-1/atta\
chment/cd774de3-070f-44fb-8f25-1263aa1697eb/mmc1.pdf> (a section
that very few read), the reduction of coronary and all-cause
mortality was only 0.2% per year. In webfigure 6 the total number
of death per year among the oldest was 850 (4.1%) in the
statin/more groups and 869 (4.3%) in the control/less groups.
This means that the number of participants in each group must
have been 19,767 and 20,209, respectively, and the total number
49,834. Thus, as the difference between the two groups was only
19 deaths, it means that you have to treat 1040 patients for a
year to prevent one death.

How many of these patients may suffer from serious side effects
is debatable. According to the statin trials it is less than
0.1%, but this is highly incredible, because in most trials the
authors have excluded those who suffered from side effects in a
short run-in period before the trial started. Many independent
authors have documented much higher numbers, and in the IDEAL
trial <https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/201883>
, where a low statin dose was compared with a high dose and where
no run-in period was included, almost 50% in each group suffered
from serious side effects. This is not mentioned in the abstract
or in the text; only in a table (table 4). Furthermore, when you
download this paper, the tables are not included. I have
therefore attached the full paper.