If i was told I had a 3% risk of having a coronary event and if I took a certain drug, it would reduce that risk by 36% to 1.9% I would certainly consider it. I would look at the costs or the risks of taking the drug (all drugs have side effects) and see if the 36% decrease was worth it I.e.a cost benefit analysis. To put it into trading terms, let's say you have a 3% chance of blowing up your account. If there was a way in which you could reduce that to 1.9% you would fucking mad not to consider it. Let's say 3% chance per year...over 30 years ...the odds of blowing up are 60%...at 1.9% a year...odds are 44%.
That's because you simply read what the drug company put out and swallow it whole. Good luck with your health. What if you had a 3% chance of a coronary event and you had 2 options 1. Change lifestyle habits to reduce that risk significantly through diet and exercise and improve other unrelated metabolic markers as a bonus with no adverse effects. 2. Take a pill with a 0% chance of preventing a coronary event over the long term, 50% chance of developing harmful side effects which will impair quality of life, increase your health care costs and actually not treat the main cause of coronary death ( it ain't cholesterol). You are telling me you would choose option 2 which shows you fail to read carefully and if you compare it to trading them I understand your poor interpretation of the odds, risks and trading performance. Anyone who would choose option 2 blindly is fucking mad. Let me guess...you feel the path to lower cholesterol and triglycerodes is eating more carbs and minimal fat right. Good luck.
Seriously...you skipped over all the info showing the link between cholesterol and CHD was broken through research and that statins actually have negligible affect in CHD risks over the long term and that the side effects of statins over time can be bad to debilitating (muscle weakness and cramping) and you want to applaud the 3% to 1.9% adjustment made by the drug....in a study funded by the drug company. Did you even read the study? Doubt it. Did you read the part of the study where the drug results were tested against diet changes? No because it does not exist nor will they ever fund that. Did the study do follow up results further down the road to show that in the long run statins reduced the risks? Mo the study stopped when they got their results. Do.some research before you say something like reducing the rate from 3% to 1.9% is good I would take the pill blindly. In fact in not one of your posts has any research just bullshit statistics based on a flawed study. An argument built on sand is easy to knock over.
The BMJ reports on the findings of a study on long term (20 year) treatment with a statin in the WOSCOPS trial by Vallejo-Vaz et al.12 The news article and publication report that, in this primary prevention trial, pravastatin reduced deaths from heart disease by 28% in men with high levels of LDL cholesterol. But 28% is the relative risk reduction; the more clinically relevant measure of drug effectiveness is absolute risk reduction, which was only 2.3% between treated and untreated groups. Both the study and the news story follow a pattern of focusing on the more dramatic, but misleading, relative risk statistic in statin trials.3 To make matters worse, the reported beneficial effects of long term statin use are not only minuscule but also unreliable. After the five year trial finished, the majority of people in the treatment group stopped taking their statin, and one third of the people in the placebo group had started statin treatment. Furthermore, the investigators did not monitor which participants were on a statin over the 15 years of follow-up. The only thing we can be certain of is that the majority of people in both groups were not on a statin in the 15 year follow-up period. We can’t be confident that the purported benefits of long term statin treatment reported by Vallejo-Vaz et al are valid. Despite the sensational headlines of The BMJ’s news story and the media attention this follow-up study generated, the study was so flawed in its methodology that it provided nothing of value in terms of guidance for clinicians seeking high calibre research on the long term effects of statins on coronary outcomes
Every adult male over the age of 50 has >3% chance of a coronary event within a year. You have a 3% chance of not waking up from general anesthesia. So everyone should take statins and nobody should ever undergo surgery?
Let's not forget one thing. In all the studies I read diet and exercise were never factored as a variable in the control or statin group and un all follow up studies, no reference was made to link improved metabolic markers against CHD risks but rather a measure of LDL ONLY. IF you have well regulated LDL you can still suffer from CHD. The large number of people who have died from CHD or related symptoms with non elevated cholesterol levels shows why the initial incidence rates were low to begin with. If high LDL levels cannot be ststistically significantly linked to high rates of CHD events the the whole premise of the study is flawed before they even get to the data. If people in the statin group lowered their LDL but still suffered CHD events, even at a lower rate the premise is further flawed. Also if size of LDL particles were never measured and HDL to LDL ratios were never calculated how do we know that LOW HDL was not the cause of many CHD events. Many sources so to ignore the absolute cholesterol number so if people for the study were screened by LDL values only then the member pool is flawed.
Here is the best attack on the study logic that no one raised... 3% is the incidence rate in a group ALREADY DEEMED TO BE AT HIGH RISK! That was the premise of the study wasn't it. So 3% of a group DEEMED TO BE HIGH RISK had a CHD event. Let me put it to you this way. If I take a group of traders deemed to be the best trader in the world and let them trade anyway they wanted to for 5 years and only 3% made money, what would that tell you? If I you claim a group has high risk for CHD and you give them no medication and in 5 years only 3% suffer an event then how high risk was this group. I would expect 30 to 50% of a high risk group to have even a minor CHD event which was part of the data. So high LDL is not high risk if low LDL people have coronary events. So LDL must not be the appropriate risk factor to gauge high risk CHD. Therefore statins are not trying to attack the branch of the tree that is making it sick they are willing to chop down the whole tree.
In the US with the way we eat and obesity rates I would think over aged 50 the chances are higher than 3% by a lot haha. One of the studies used to approve statins was done in Scotland by the way. Not sure of whiskey and haggis have an effect.
You need re read my post. I said v clearly i would look at the risks of taking the drug v the benefits.
I'm all for it...but the problem is your typical overweight/obese 50 yr old plus male aint gonna do this though! He's not going to change his lifestyle. Should society tell him to f off?