Bob Unruh just wrote an article in WorldNetDaily regarding the Petition Project which begins with this...
"More than 31,000 scientists across the United States, including more than 9,000 Ph.D.s in fields including atmospheric science, climatology, Earth science, environment and dozens of other specialties, have signed a petition rejecting "global warming," the assumption that the human production of greenhouse gases is damaging Earth's climate."
It is an update since my previous mention stated 19000 signers. Going on double that now.
Read the article at http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=64734
You can even find out their names and breakdown by state. Click here for names.
Will the other side which claims a consensus do that?
See also here and here.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Saturday, May 3, 2008
Jeffrey Dach MD on heart disease
Jeffrey Dach MD has posted an article on heart disease that is clear and well docummented for those interested. I think a big part of properly treating something is to understand the mechanism that causes it. This article helps me understand Atherosclerosis in easy-to-understand language and I highly recommend it for your reading. The article is titled "Part Two". Part One I mentioned previously in my post titled "A topic near to my heart" below and the article can be read in full here.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Pfizer shines?
Read this and then consider carefully your use of cholesterol lowering drugs. The whole thing doesn't seem to be driven toward improving health. Maybe "$" ???
Pfizer's Cholesterol Drug Boosts Death Rate by 58 Percent
from NewsTarget.com
(NaturalNews) Patients who take the cholesterol drug torcetrapid, intended to increase levels of HDL ("good") cholesterol and lower LDL ("bad") cholesterol levels, have a 58 percent higher risk of death than similar patients who do not take the drug, according to a study led by researchers at the Heart Research Institute in Sydney and published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Researchers studied 15,067 participants, all considered to be at high risk of cardiovascular disease. All the patients were treated with the cholesterol-lowering drug atorvastatin, while half were also treated with torcetrapid.
Torcetrapid is marketed by Pfizer, as is atorvastatin (under the brand name Lipitor).
Patients receiving both drugs had a 58 percent higher chance of dying and a 25 percent higher chance of experiencing cardiovascular events such as heart attacks than those who were treated only with atorvastatin.
Torcetrapid is one of a new class of drugs called cholesteryl ester transfer protein (CETP) inhibitors. Unlike older cholesterol drugs, which only lower LDL levels, CETP inhibitors are intended to raise HDL levels at the same time. The drugs function by blocking the action of a protein that transfers cholesterol from HDL to LDL, thus forcing the cholesterol to remain in HDL form.
In the recent study, torcetrapid was found to raise HDL levels by an average of 72.1 percent, and lower LDL levels by an average of 24.9 percent.
Scientists are still unclear why torcetrapid appears to increase patient death rates and heart attack risk. While the drug is known to raise blood pressure, many of the patients who died in the recent study actually had blood pressure levels below normal.
Researchers have hypothesized that the drug may increase the levels of a hormone involved in regulating blood pressure, and that this may lead to stress on the cardiovascular system.
Merck and Roche Holding have placed the development of their own CETP inhibitors on hold, pending the results of further trials on torcetrapid.
Pfizer's Cholesterol Drug Boosts Death Rate by 58 Percent
from NewsTarget.com
(NaturalNews) Patients who take the cholesterol drug torcetrapid, intended to increase levels of HDL ("good") cholesterol and lower LDL ("bad") cholesterol levels, have a 58 percent higher risk of death than similar patients who do not take the drug, according to a study led by researchers at the Heart Research Institute in Sydney and published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Researchers studied 15,067 participants, all considered to be at high risk of cardiovascular disease. All the patients were treated with the cholesterol-lowering drug atorvastatin, while half were also treated with torcetrapid.
Torcetrapid is marketed by Pfizer, as is atorvastatin (under the brand name Lipitor).
Patients receiving both drugs had a 58 percent higher chance of dying and a 25 percent higher chance of experiencing cardiovascular events such as heart attacks than those who were treated only with atorvastatin.
Torcetrapid is one of a new class of drugs called cholesteryl ester transfer protein (CETP) inhibitors. Unlike older cholesterol drugs, which only lower LDL levels, CETP inhibitors are intended to raise HDL levels at the same time. The drugs function by blocking the action of a protein that transfers cholesterol from HDL to LDL, thus forcing the cholesterol to remain in HDL form.
In the recent study, torcetrapid was found to raise HDL levels by an average of 72.1 percent, and lower LDL levels by an average of 24.9 percent.
Scientists are still unclear why torcetrapid appears to increase patient death rates and heart attack risk. While the drug is known to raise blood pressure, many of the patients who died in the recent study actually had blood pressure levels below normal.
Researchers have hypothesized that the drug may increase the levels of a hormone involved in regulating blood pressure, and that this may lead to stress on the cardiovascular system.
Merck and Roche Holding have placed the development of their own CETP inhibitors on hold, pending the results of further trials on torcetrapid.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
A topic near to my heart
In a new article by Dr Dach he provides some very helpful information on the 'CAT Coronary Calcium Score' which is better than other methods used to predict heart attacks. A couple of summary paragraphs from his article to whet your appetite follow.
"Information provided by Calcium Score CAT Scan may provide information about heart disease risk that is actually more valuable than the conventional lipid profile, cholesterol level or the Framingham risk equation.
Advocates of coronary calcium scoring like William Davis MD recommend use of screening CT heart scans in any male 40 years of age or older, females 50 years and older, but starting at younger ages if any high-risk feature is present (heart disease in young family members, substantial smoking history, diabetes, severe lipid or lipoprotein disorders). Although not currently covered by insurance, the AHA statement may speed acceptance by health insurance companies and hopefully, CT heart scanning may soon be covered."
Please read the complete article as it provides some very practical information on how to reduce your Coronary Artery Calcium Score thereby reducing your risk of heart attack.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Diet, Fat and Cascades (not the mountains)
Dieting, and therefore since to many they're intimately related, Fat (as in low-fat) are big topics these days amoung health professionals and regular people alike. And it seems like most are pretty well agreed in some sort of way at least that 'good' dieting is virtually synonymous with 'low fat' intake. Therefore it must be based on good scientific evidence, right? Why else would there be such consensus?
The following article from the New York Times might offer some enlightenment on the subject. It's a bit long but worth the read. Hope you will agree.
But what does this all have to do with 'cascades'? Well pay particular attention to author John Tierney's explanation of and discussion of an 'informational cascade' within the context of the dieting and fat arena.
I do believe I have noted a very similar effect also in the 'science' of global warming. Or am I the victim of or participant in an informational cascade?
===============================================
October 9, 2007
Findings
Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus
By JOHN TIERNEY
In 1988, the surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, proclaimed ice cream to a be public-health menace right up there with cigarettes. Alluding to his office’s famous 1964 report on the perils of smoking, Dr. Koop announced that the American diet was a problem of “comparable” magnitude, chiefly because of the high-fat foods that were causing coronary heart disease and other deadly ailments.
He introduced his report with these words: “The depth of the science base underlying its findings is even more impressive than that for tobacco and health in 1964.”
That was a ludicrous statement, as Gary Taubes demonstrates in his new book meticulously debunking diet myths, “Good Calories, Bad Calories” (Knopf, 2007). The notion that fatty foods shorten your life began as a hypothesis based on dubious assumptions and data; when scientists tried to confirm it they failed repeatedly. The evidence against Häagen-Dazs was nothing like the evidence against Marlboros.
It may seem bizarre that a surgeon general could go so wrong. After all, wasn’t it his job to express the scientific consensus? But that was the problem. Dr. Koop was expressing the consensus. He, like the architects of the federal “food pyramid” telling Americans what to eat, went wrong by listening to everyone else. He was caught in what social scientists call a cascade.
We like to think that people improve their judgment by putting their minds together, and sometimes they do. The studio audience at “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” usually votes for the right answer. But suppose, instead of the audience members voting silently in unison, they voted out loud one after another. And suppose the first person gets it wrong.
If the second person isn’t sure of the answer, he’s liable to go along with the first person’s guess. By then, even if the third person suspects another answer is right, she’s more liable to go along just because she assumes the first two together know more than she does. Thus begins an “informational cascade” as one person after another assumes that the rest can’t all be wrong.
Because of this effect, groups are surprisingly prone to reach mistaken conclusions even when most of the people started out knowing better, according to the economists Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer and Ivo Welch. If, say, 60 percent of a group’s members have been given information pointing them to the right answer (while the rest have information pointing to the wrong answer), there is still about a one-in-three chance that the group will cascade to a mistaken consensus.
Cascades are especially common in medicine as doctors take their cues from others, leading them to overdiagnose some faddish ailments (called bandwagon diseases) and overprescribe certain treatments (like the tonsillectomies once popular for children). Unable to keep up with the volume of research, doctors look for guidance from an expert — or at least someone who sounds confident.
In the case of fatty foods, that confident voice belonged to Ancel Keys, a prominent diet researcher a half-century ago (the K-rations in World War II were said to be named after him). He became convinced in the 1950s that Americans were suffering from a new epidemic of heart disease because they were eating more fat than their ancestors.
There were two glaring problems with this theory, as Mr. Taubes, a correspondent for Science magazine, explains in his book. First, it wasn’t clear that traditional diets were especially lean. Nineteenth-century Americans consumed huge amounts of meat; the percentage of fat in the diet of ancient hunter-gatherers, according to the best estimate today, was as high or higher than the ratio in the modern Western diet.
Second, there wasn’t really a new epidemic of heart disease. Yes, more cases were being reported, but not because people were in worse health. It was mainly because they were living longer and were more likely to see a doctor who diagnosed the symptoms.
To bolster his theory, Dr. Keys in 1953 compared diets and heart disease rates in the United States, Japan and four other countries. Sure enough, more fat correlated with more disease (America topped the list). But critics at the time noted that if Dr. Keys had analyzed all 22 countries for which data were available, he would not have found a correlation. (And, as Mr. Taubes notes, no one would have puzzled over the so-called French Paradox of foie-gras connoisseurs with healthy hearts.)
The evidence that dietary fat correlates with heart disease “does not stand up to critical examination,” the American Heart Association concluded in 1957. But three years later the association changed position — not because of new data, Mr. Taubes writes, but because Dr. Keys and an ally were on the committee issuing the new report. It asserted that “the best scientific evidence of the time” warranted a lower-fat diet for people at high risk of heart disease.
The association’s report was big news and put Dr. Keys, who died in 2004, on the cover of Time magazine. The magazine devoted four pages to the topic — and just one paragraph noting that Dr. Keys’s diet advice was “still questioned by some researchers.” That set the tone for decades of news media coverage. Journalists and their audiences were looking for clear guidance, not scientific ambiguity.
After the fat-is-bad theory became popular wisdom, the cascade accelerated in the 1970s when a committee led by Senator George McGovern issued a report advising Americans to lower their risk of heart disease by eating less fat. “McGovern’s staff were virtually unaware of the existence of any scientific controversy,” Mr. Taubes writes, and the committee’s report was written by a nonscientist “relying almost exclusively on a single Harvard nutritionist, Mark Hegsted.”
That report impressed another nonscientist, Carol Tucker Foreman, an assistant agriculture secretary, who hired Dr. Hegsted to draw up a set of national dietary guidelines. The Department of Agriculture’s advice against eating too much fat was issued in 1980 and would later be incorporated in its “food pyramid.”
Meanwhile, there still wasn’t good evidence to warrant recommending a low-fat diet for all Americans, as the National Academy of Sciences noted in a report shortly after the U.S.D.A. guidelines were issued. But the report’s authors were promptly excoriated on Capitol Hill and in the news media for denying a danger that had already been proclaimed by the American Heart Association, the McGovern committee and the U.S.D.A.
The scientists, despite their impressive credentials, were accused of bias because some of them had done research financed by the food industry. And so the informational cascade morphed into what the economist Timur Kuran calls a reputational cascade, in which it becomes a career risk for dissidents to question the popular wisdom.
With skeptical scientists ostracized, the public debate and research agenda became dominated by the fat-is-bad school. Later the National Institutes of Health would hold a “consensus conference” that concluded there was “no doubt” that low-fat diets “will afford significant protection against coronary heart disease” for every American over the age of 2. The American Cancer Society and the surgeon general recommended a low-fat diet to prevent cancer.
But when the theories were tested in clinical trials, the evidence kept turning up negative. As Mr. Taubes notes, the most rigorous meta-analysis of the clinical trials of low-fat diets, published in 2001 by the Cochrane Collaboration, concluded that they had no significant effect on mortality.
Mr. Taubes argues that the low-fat recommendations, besides being unjustified, may well have harmed Americans by encouraging them to switch to carbohydrates, which he believes cause obesity and disease. He acknowledges that that hypothesis is unproved, and that the low-carb diet fad could turn out to be another mistaken cascade. The problem, he says, is that the low-carb hypothesis hasn’t been seriously studied because it couldn’t be reconciled with the low-fat dogma.
Mr. Taubes told me he especially admired the iconoclasm of Dr. Edward H. Ahrens Jr., a lipids researcher who spoke out against the McGovern committee’s report. Mr. McGovern subsequently asked him at a hearing to reconcile his skepticism with a survey showing that the low-fat recommendations were endorsed by 92 percent of “the world’s leading doctors.”
“Senator McGovern, I recognize the disadvantage of being in the minority,” Dr. Ahrens replied. Then he pointed out that most of the doctors in the survey were relying on secondhand knowledge because they didn’t work in this field themselves.
“This is a matter,” he continued, “of such enormous social, economic and medical importance that it must be evaluated with our eyes completely open. Thus I would hate to see this issue settled by anything that smacks of a Gallup poll.” Or a cascade.
This article copied without permission from http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/science/09tier.html?pagewanted=1&_r=4&partner=rssuserland
The following article from the New York Times might offer some enlightenment on the subject. It's a bit long but worth the read. Hope you will agree.
But what does this all have to do with 'cascades'? Well pay particular attention to author John Tierney's explanation of and discussion of an 'informational cascade' within the context of the dieting and fat arena.
I do believe I have noted a very similar effect also in the 'science' of global warming. Or am I the victim of or participant in an informational cascade?
===============================================
October 9, 2007
Findings
Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus
By JOHN TIERNEY
In 1988, the surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, proclaimed ice cream to a be public-health menace right up there with cigarettes. Alluding to his office’s famous 1964 report on the perils of smoking, Dr. Koop announced that the American diet was a problem of “comparable” magnitude, chiefly because of the high-fat foods that were causing coronary heart disease and other deadly ailments.
He introduced his report with these words: “The depth of the science base underlying its findings is even more impressive than that for tobacco and health in 1964.”
That was a ludicrous statement, as Gary Taubes demonstrates in his new book meticulously debunking diet myths, “Good Calories, Bad Calories” (Knopf, 2007). The notion that fatty foods shorten your life began as a hypothesis based on dubious assumptions and data; when scientists tried to confirm it they failed repeatedly. The evidence against Häagen-Dazs was nothing like the evidence against Marlboros.
It may seem bizarre that a surgeon general could go so wrong. After all, wasn’t it his job to express the scientific consensus? But that was the problem. Dr. Koop was expressing the consensus. He, like the architects of the federal “food pyramid” telling Americans what to eat, went wrong by listening to everyone else. He was caught in what social scientists call a cascade.
We like to think that people improve their judgment by putting their minds together, and sometimes they do. The studio audience at “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” usually votes for the right answer. But suppose, instead of the audience members voting silently in unison, they voted out loud one after another. And suppose the first person gets it wrong.
If the second person isn’t sure of the answer, he’s liable to go along with the first person’s guess. By then, even if the third person suspects another answer is right, she’s more liable to go along just because she assumes the first two together know more than she does. Thus begins an “informational cascade” as one person after another assumes that the rest can’t all be wrong.
Because of this effect, groups are surprisingly prone to reach mistaken conclusions even when most of the people started out knowing better, according to the economists Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer and Ivo Welch. If, say, 60 percent of a group’s members have been given information pointing them to the right answer (while the rest have information pointing to the wrong answer), there is still about a one-in-three chance that the group will cascade to a mistaken consensus.
Cascades are especially common in medicine as doctors take their cues from others, leading them to overdiagnose some faddish ailments (called bandwagon diseases) and overprescribe certain treatments (like the tonsillectomies once popular for children). Unable to keep up with the volume of research, doctors look for guidance from an expert — or at least someone who sounds confident.
In the case of fatty foods, that confident voice belonged to Ancel Keys, a prominent diet researcher a half-century ago (the K-rations in World War II were said to be named after him). He became convinced in the 1950s that Americans were suffering from a new epidemic of heart disease because they were eating more fat than their ancestors.
There were two glaring problems with this theory, as Mr. Taubes, a correspondent for Science magazine, explains in his book. First, it wasn’t clear that traditional diets were especially lean. Nineteenth-century Americans consumed huge amounts of meat; the percentage of fat in the diet of ancient hunter-gatherers, according to the best estimate today, was as high or higher than the ratio in the modern Western diet.
Second, there wasn’t really a new epidemic of heart disease. Yes, more cases were being reported, but not because people were in worse health. It was mainly because they were living longer and were more likely to see a doctor who diagnosed the symptoms.
To bolster his theory, Dr. Keys in 1953 compared diets and heart disease rates in the United States, Japan and four other countries. Sure enough, more fat correlated with more disease (America topped the list). But critics at the time noted that if Dr. Keys had analyzed all 22 countries for which data were available, he would not have found a correlation. (And, as Mr. Taubes notes, no one would have puzzled over the so-called French Paradox of foie-gras connoisseurs with healthy hearts.)
The evidence that dietary fat correlates with heart disease “does not stand up to critical examination,” the American Heart Association concluded in 1957. But three years later the association changed position — not because of new data, Mr. Taubes writes, but because Dr. Keys and an ally were on the committee issuing the new report. It asserted that “the best scientific evidence of the time” warranted a lower-fat diet for people at high risk of heart disease.
The association’s report was big news and put Dr. Keys, who died in 2004, on the cover of Time magazine. The magazine devoted four pages to the topic — and just one paragraph noting that Dr. Keys’s diet advice was “still questioned by some researchers.” That set the tone for decades of news media coverage. Journalists and their audiences were looking for clear guidance, not scientific ambiguity.
After the fat-is-bad theory became popular wisdom, the cascade accelerated in the 1970s when a committee led by Senator George McGovern issued a report advising Americans to lower their risk of heart disease by eating less fat. “McGovern’s staff were virtually unaware of the existence of any scientific controversy,” Mr. Taubes writes, and the committee’s report was written by a nonscientist “relying almost exclusively on a single Harvard nutritionist, Mark Hegsted.”
That report impressed another nonscientist, Carol Tucker Foreman, an assistant agriculture secretary, who hired Dr. Hegsted to draw up a set of national dietary guidelines. The Department of Agriculture’s advice against eating too much fat was issued in 1980 and would later be incorporated in its “food pyramid.”
Meanwhile, there still wasn’t good evidence to warrant recommending a low-fat diet for all Americans, as the National Academy of Sciences noted in a report shortly after the U.S.D.A. guidelines were issued. But the report’s authors were promptly excoriated on Capitol Hill and in the news media for denying a danger that had already been proclaimed by the American Heart Association, the McGovern committee and the U.S.D.A.
The scientists, despite their impressive credentials, were accused of bias because some of them had done research financed by the food industry. And so the informational cascade morphed into what the economist Timur Kuran calls a reputational cascade, in which it becomes a career risk for dissidents to question the popular wisdom.
With skeptical scientists ostracized, the public debate and research agenda became dominated by the fat-is-bad school. Later the National Institutes of Health would hold a “consensus conference” that concluded there was “no doubt” that low-fat diets “will afford significant protection against coronary heart disease” for every American over the age of 2. The American Cancer Society and the surgeon general recommended a low-fat diet to prevent cancer.
But when the theories were tested in clinical trials, the evidence kept turning up negative. As Mr. Taubes notes, the most rigorous meta-analysis of the clinical trials of low-fat diets, published in 2001 by the Cochrane Collaboration, concluded that they had no significant effect on mortality.
Mr. Taubes argues that the low-fat recommendations, besides being unjustified, may well have harmed Americans by encouraging them to switch to carbohydrates, which he believes cause obesity and disease. He acknowledges that that hypothesis is unproved, and that the low-carb diet fad could turn out to be another mistaken cascade. The problem, he says, is that the low-carb hypothesis hasn’t been seriously studied because it couldn’t be reconciled with the low-fat dogma.
Mr. Taubes told me he especially admired the iconoclasm of Dr. Edward H. Ahrens Jr., a lipids researcher who spoke out against the McGovern committee’s report. Mr. McGovern subsequently asked him at a hearing to reconcile his skepticism with a survey showing that the low-fat recommendations were endorsed by 92 percent of “the world’s leading doctors.”
“Senator McGovern, I recognize the disadvantage of being in the minority,” Dr. Ahrens replied. Then he pointed out that most of the doctors in the survey were relying on secondhand knowledge because they didn’t work in this field themselves.
“This is a matter,” he continued, “of such enormous social, economic and medical importance that it must be evaluated with our eyes completely open. Thus I would hate to see this issue settled by anything that smacks of a Gallup poll.” Or a cascade.
This article copied without permission from http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/science/09tier.html?pagewanted=1&_r=4&partner=rssuserland
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Doctors in Denial about Patients' Side Effects from Prescription Drugs
NaturalNews.com published February 21 2008
Doctors in Denial about Patients' Side Effects from Prescription Drugs
by David Gutierrez (NaturalNews)
Doctors are overwhelmingly inclined to dismiss patients' complaints about potential side-effects from cholesterol-reducing statins and rarely report those complaints to the FDA, according to a survey conducted by researchers from the University of California at San Diego and published in the peer-reviewed journal Drug Safety.
The study suggests that doctors have a tendency to attribute patients' complaints to age or other factors unrelated to prescription drugs, and that this problem may extend to drugs other than statins.
"Person after person spontaneously [told] us that their doctors told them that symptoms like muscle pain couldn't have come from the drug," said lead researcher Beatrice Golomb. "We were surprised at how prevalent that experience was.
"The researchers solicited survey respondents through advertisements and over the Internet, including on web sites where patients had complained about side effects from the drugs. Most of the respondents lived in the United States, and the average age was in the early 60s. The majority of respondents reported having complained to their doctors about problems that arose after they began the drugs, particularly memory and attention problems or tingling and numbness in the extremities. But few doctors made a connection between these complaints and the drugs, even when the symptoms were documented side effects.
"Overwhelmingly, it was the patient that initiated that conversation," Golomb said. Doctors instead tended to blame the symptoms on aging or even to dismiss them as insignificant or imaginary.
As much as 30 percent of patients taking statins may experience muscle pain or other side effects. But these numbers may be on the low end if doctors are not reporting side effects when they occur.
The FDA relies primarily on doctors to fill out "adverse event reports" to help monitor drugs after they have hit the market. Patients can also file reports at http://www.FDA.gov/medwatch but few people are aware of this program. In contrast, other countries such as New Zealand rely heavily on data from patients to continue monitoring drugs.
According to Golomb, one-fifth of all FDA-approved drugs will eventually be withdrawn from the market or given black-box warnings due to severe side effects.
Article from http://www.naturalnews.com/022687.html
Doctors in Denial about Patients' Side Effects from Prescription Drugs
by David Gutierrez (NaturalNews)
Doctors are overwhelmingly inclined to dismiss patients' complaints about potential side-effects from cholesterol-reducing statins and rarely report those complaints to the FDA, according to a survey conducted by researchers from the University of California at San Diego and published in the peer-reviewed journal Drug Safety.
The study suggests that doctors have a tendency to attribute patients' complaints to age or other factors unrelated to prescription drugs, and that this problem may extend to drugs other than statins.
"Person after person spontaneously [told] us that their doctors told them that symptoms like muscle pain couldn't have come from the drug," said lead researcher Beatrice Golomb. "We were surprised at how prevalent that experience was.
"The researchers solicited survey respondents through advertisements and over the Internet, including on web sites where patients had complained about side effects from the drugs. Most of the respondents lived in the United States, and the average age was in the early 60s. The majority of respondents reported having complained to their doctors about problems that arose after they began the drugs, particularly memory and attention problems or tingling and numbness in the extremities. But few doctors made a connection between these complaints and the drugs, even when the symptoms were documented side effects.
"Overwhelmingly, it was the patient that initiated that conversation," Golomb said. Doctors instead tended to blame the symptoms on aging or even to dismiss them as insignificant or imaginary.
As much as 30 percent of patients taking statins may experience muscle pain or other side effects. But these numbers may be on the low end if doctors are not reporting side effects when they occur.
The FDA relies primarily on doctors to fill out "adverse event reports" to help monitor drugs after they have hit the market. Patients can also file reports at http://www.FDA.gov/medwatch but few people are aware of this program. In contrast, other countries such as New Zealand rely heavily on data from patients to continue monitoring drugs.
According to Golomb, one-fifth of all FDA-approved drugs will eventually be withdrawn from the market or given black-box warnings due to severe side effects.
Article from http://www.naturalnews.com/022687.html
Monday, February 11, 2008
Cholesterol Lowering Statin Drugs for Women, Just Say No by Jeffrey Dach MD
See Dr. Jeffrey Dach's good article on cholesterol and women here. Lot of good information for the rest of us as well.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Current clinical evidence does not demonstrate that titrating lipid therapy to achieve proposed low LDL cholesterol levels is beneficial or safe.
From the Annals of Internal Medicine - (3 October 2006 Volume 145 Issue 7 Pages 520-530).
by Rodney A. Hayward, MD; Timothy P. Hofer, MD, MSc; and Sandeep Vijan, MD, MSc
"The authors found no clinical trial subgroup analyses or valid cohort or case–control analyses suggesting that the degree to which LDL cholesterol responds to a statin independently predicts the degree of cardiovascular risk reduction."
Here are the 'Key Summary Points"
by Rodney A. Hayward, MD; Timothy P. Hofer, MD, MSc; and Sandeep Vijan, MD, MSc
"The authors found no clinical trial subgroup analyses or valid cohort or case–control analyses suggesting that the degree to which LDL cholesterol responds to a statin independently predicts the degree of cardiovascular risk reduction."
Here are the 'Key Summary Points"
- No high-quality evidence could be found that suggests that titrating lipid therapy to recommended low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol targets is superior to empirically prescribing doses of statins used in clinical trials for all patients at high cardiovascular risk.
- Studies addressing benefits of achieving LDL cholesterol goals have had avoidable problems, such as reliance on ecological (aggregate) analyses, ignoring statins' other proposed mechanisms of action, and not accounting for known confounders (especially healthy volunteer effects).
- Much more reliable evidence on currently proposed LDL cholesterol goals could be expeditiously produced by conducting cohort analyses of past statin trials that control for statin dose and pill adherence.
- Dichotomous comparisons (such as comparing those who reach goal vs. those who do not) can mistakenly suggest that not achieving the treatment goal results in moderate risk when in fact almost all of the risk is caused by large deviations from the ideal goal.
- Proposals for treatment goals should also consider the risks, patient burden, and societal costs of the treatments that may be needed to reach those goals.
Monday, November 26, 2007
A lesson from "Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) Dietary Modification Trial. "
Sandy Szwarc states the purpose of her blog Junkfood Science to be:
"Critical examinations of studies and news on food, weight, health and healthcare that mainstream media misses. Debunks popular myths, explains science and exposes fraud that affects your health. Plus some fun food for thought. For readers not afraid to question and think critically to get to the truth."
She then discusses some results of the WHI that didn't seem to make headlines. It's a good read and quite informative. Read her full article HERE.
"Critical examinations of studies and news on food, weight, health and healthcare that mainstream media misses. Debunks popular myths, explains science and exposes fraud that affects your health. Plus some fun food for thought. For readers not afraid to question and think critically to get to the truth."
She then discusses some results of the WHI that didn't seem to make headlines. It's a good read and quite informative. Read her full article HERE.
Are you a woman taking cholesterol lowering statin medication? Please read this.
In their paper "Evidence for Caution: Women and statin use" authors Harriet Rosenberg and Danielle Allard make the following statement,
"Our review of these fields identifies a troubling disjuncture between the widespread use of statin medication for women and the evidence base for that usage. What we found instead was evidence for caution."
Then in their conclusion they state
"We have assessed the impact of statin use on women starting from the assumption that if a woman is put on a drug for the rest of her life, the reasons for doing so must be based on the highest quality, most credible data possible. There must be solid evidence of advantage over harm and careful analysis of any serious adverse outcomes that may arise immediately or with years or decades of use or when used in conjunction with other drugs commonly prescribed for women. In other words, a Canadian woman should be able to take a pill, safe in the knowledge that its benefits and safety were tested on women like her. She should embark on long-term commitment to a drug therapy with the understanding that she is highly likely to derive a clear advantage in terms of health and longevity and also feel confident that information about any risks will be explained to her in meaningful and accessible language.
These expectations have not been met. Instead we have found a pattern of overestimation of benefit and underestimation of harm."
Please read the full article HERE.
"Our review of these fields identifies a troubling disjuncture between the widespread use of statin medication for women and the evidence base for that usage. What we found instead was evidence for caution."
Then in their conclusion they state
"We have assessed the impact of statin use on women starting from the assumption that if a woman is put on a drug for the rest of her life, the reasons for doing so must be based on the highest quality, most credible data possible. There must be solid evidence of advantage over harm and careful analysis of any serious adverse outcomes that may arise immediately or with years or decades of use or when used in conjunction with other drugs commonly prescribed for women. In other words, a Canadian woman should be able to take a pill, safe in the knowledge that its benefits and safety were tested on women like her. She should embark on long-term commitment to a drug therapy with the understanding that she is highly likely to derive a clear advantage in terms of health and longevity and also feel confident that information about any risks will be explained to her in meaningful and accessible language.
These expectations have not been met. Instead we have found a pattern of overestimation of benefit and underestimation of harm."
Please read the full article HERE.
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