Statins for Dessert

The way they keep pushing statins, we'll be getting them as sprinkles on our ice cream cones by next summer. After last week's PR push, a little hunting around yields the more rounded out stories that, unfortunately, won't get such wide airing for the unsuspecting public. This article, for instance, won't get the same audience that last week's saturation campaign got. In it we find that "...because of the way the Jupiter results were reported, many healthy people are likely to get an exaggerated view of statins’ benefits."

How exaggerated? Well, re-phrasing the wallop of an alleged 50% reduction of heart risk, they could've said, "Only 1.8 percent of the subjects who took a placebo had a major cardiovascular problem during the study period. Among statin users, 0.9 percent did. In other words, the absolute risk of a serious cardiovascular problem (as opposed to the relative risk) was reduced by less than one percentage point." Instead, they said that the study showed the reduction in risk was 50%...

Amazing how 50% relative is actually only 0.5% absolute, eh? But the drug company spin-meisters are very adept at getting the heavy press on spin, and very little press on actual facts.

So far this year, the drug pushers have done PR campaigns to get children onto lifetime prescriptions for statins (in early July), and then a push to get people to believe they can avert Alzheimer's by taking statins (in late July).

What's next, ...indigestion?