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Everyone over 50 should take statins to lower their cholesterol , an editorial argued last week in The Lancet . The piece based its recommendation on a meta-analysis of 27 clinical trials published in the same issue that concluded statins significantlyreduce the risk of heart attacks and other cardiovascular events inhealthy people without posing substantial risks. Subsequentarticles heralding the meta-analysis's findings were published inthe Guardian , Forbes and the U.K. Telegraph . But based on the numbers, many experts still aren't convincedthat the drugs' benefits outweigh their risks. There's no question that statins save lives when they areprescribed to people with cardiovascular disease. But whether thedrugs should also be given to healthy people who do not have highcholesterol or other cardiovascular risk factors has been along-standing and controversial question. One large clinical trial known as JUPITER reported in 2008 that rosuvastatin (Crestor)lowers the risk of heart attacks and other events by 44 percent inhealthy subjects but experts have since raised questions about its methodology in part because the trial was stopped early,which might have created the effect of overestimating the drug'sbenefits. The current meta-analysis was designed to help put theissue to rest. "Our aim was to bring together all theavailable evidence," explains co-author Colin Baigent, anepidemiologist at the University of Oxford in England. After pooling the results of 27 trials involving 165,149 people,the meta-analysis reported that people are 21 percent less likelyto suffer a serious vascular event such as a heart attack, strokeor bypass surgery after their cholesterol drops by the amount thatmight be expected after taking statins for a year than are similarpeople who do not take the pills. But such outcomes are rare inhealthy individuals anyway, so the risk reduction actuallytranslated to a small clinical benefit—reducing the overallrisk from 4.04 percent to 3.27 percent per year, a difference of0.77 percent. In other words, approximately 130 people need to take statins for ayear to prevent just one unwanted health outcome, and 500 peoplehave to take them to prevent a single death. "Once you getdown to very low levels of risk, the benefits are very small,"Baigent admits. Experts also raise questions about the subjects included in themeta-analysis. Although the review was supposedly designed toassess the effects of statins in people at low risk of vasculardisease, 60 percent of its participants in fact already had vascular disease. "Why combine people who have heart disease with people who don't? It's really misleading," says KausikRay, a cardiologist at Saint George's University of London. In 2010Ray and his colleagues published a meta-analysis of 11 statin clinical trials involving 65,229 subjects without cardiovascular disease andconcluded that statins do not reduce the risk of death in healthypeople. (By including people who had vascular disease, the Lancet meta-analysis overestimated statins' benefits: a subgroup analysisreveals that among people who did not have vascular disease,statins only reduced the absolute risk of a cardiovascular event by0.4 percent per year.). I am an expert from fertilizertech.com, while we provides the quality product, such as NPK Compound Fertilizer Manufacturer , China BioFungicide, Biological Fertilizers,and more.
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