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So, you guys still arguing about guns and racism and shit?
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I really love you baby, I love what you've got
Let's get together we can, Get hot -
I'm not...
I really don't give a fuck...Comment
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Um there are different types of drugs. People getting hooked on prescription painkillers has nothing to do with this case where a woman had a large atrial septal defect which wasn't diagnosed until she was in her 20s which could well have caused long term damage to her heart requiring her to be on a long term drug regime to help regulate her drug pressure and diuretics. Praying won't fix that.
Just to clarify the heart is a muscular organ in both humans and other animals, which pumps blood through the blood vessels of the circulatory system. Blood provides the body with oxygen and nutrients, and also assists in the removal of metabolic wastes.
Of course it wouldn't surprise me if you don't believe that and think the heart is just some media conspiracy.Comment
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Medical Detective
British government figures released last week show that 92 deaths have been linked to the statin drugs developed to lower cholesterol.
It is believed that the death toll could be higher because doctors are reluctant to blame drugs they prescribe for harming patients.
Experts are calling for a complete safety review of heart drugs taken by millions of Britons.
More than 37 of the deaths were attributed to Zocor.
Lipitor, made by Pfizer, was associated with 36 of the deaths.
Three other leading statin brands -- Novartis's Lescol, BMS's Lipostat and AstraZeneca's Crestor -- have been associated with 19 deaths.
As well as the deaths there have also been reports of 7,000 side effects reported to the Department of Health by doctors, including kidney and liver damage and muscle weakness.
There are an estimated 4 million people taking the drugs, almost a third more than a year ago.
Cholesterol Confusion Among the Researchers
Anxiety about overuse of the drugs is coupled with a growing body of research suggesting the connection between cholesterol levels and health is more complex than previously thought.
A number of investigations have discovered that people with higher amounts of cholesterol live longer than those with lower levels.
Despite growing evidence that cholesterol is not the primary cause of heart disease, the pharmaceutical industry still is aggressively marketing statins.
The Death of a Tennis Player
Next month an inquest is to take place into the death of Ivor Meacher, 71, a fit former tennis coach from Okehampton, Devon, who became ill and died within weeks of being prescribed a statin for an irregular heartbeat.
Research by his daughter, Jay Ballard, has produced what she says is irrefutable evidence that his death was caused by the drug atorvastatin, manufactured by Pfizer and marketed in Britain as Lipitor.
Eventually she contacted Andrew Herxheimer, emeritus fellow of the United Kingdom Cochrane Centre and co-founder of DIPEx (an electronic database of patients' experiences) in Oxford. He has filed a yellow card on her behalf.
Herxheimer, however, has questioned the heavy promotion of the drugs. "We don't know what other things statins do apart from reducing lipids in the liver," he said.
The Most Severe Side Effect
The most severe adverse effect of statins is called rhabdomyolysis, where muscle is "dissolved" and the breakdown products block the kidneys, with fatal consequences.
The Food and Drug Administration, which licenses medications in America, has been forced to review the safety of one statin in particular: Crestor.
This came after David Graham, the FDA's leading drug safety expert, turned whistleblower last autumn to raise concerns about levels of kidney damage.
Beatrice Golomb, a scientist at the University of California in San Diego, has been sponsored by the National Institutes of Health to investigate the effects of statins on mental function in 1,000 patients. It is understood she has recorded a number of problems ranging from memory lapses to changes in personality.
Last year a study of almost 150,000 people in Austria found that those with the lowest cholesterol were more likely to die of cancer.
Andrew Clark, a cardiologist at Castle Hill hospital in Hull, was the co-author of an international study of 417 heart failure patients that showed those with highest cholesterol levels actually lived longer.
The Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin, which advises doctors on drug safety, is concerned about the marketing of statins and is planning a review of the sale of Zocor over the counter. "We are concerned there is no research data on the efficacy of the recommended dose, and there is also a potentially lethal effect if you drink grapefruit juice while taking it," said its editor, Ike Iheanacho. Another statin drug called Lipobay was withdrawn in 2001 after unacceptably high death rates among patients.
Mark Harvey, a solicitor who represented more than 50 British patients who claimed they had suffered adverse effects from taking it, said last week: "There is an increasing crisis of confidence in public authorities. They keep telling us they are looking after us, but we keep having drugs taken off the market after too many people have been damaged by them."
Dr. Grisanti's Comments
How would you react if you knew a certain food you commonly eat had killed 92 people?
I bet you would not eat it.
Now how would you feel if this same food was heavily promoted on television and print media as being safe and without complications?
If you are anything like me, I would have serious concern and would be wondering what in the world was going on.
Remember, big profits have a way of blinding the truth.Comment
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To put your BS article in proportion about 92 deaths the UK regulatory body the National Institute for Health Care and Excellence(NICE) estimates that each year statins prevent 28 000 heart attacks and 16 000 strokes.
Who are NICE? They are what you posted as being Obama's death panels. These are the people who decide whether it is justified to give someone an expensive drug in our public healthcare system. In other words they are constantly under pressure to save money by prescribing less.Comment
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A quick google of your 'article' shows it was written by some bozo called Ronald Grisanti.
He is most famous for being utterly owned when he posted a total hoax about reusing plastic bottles killed you.
And he's a chiropractor so way out his depth on this.
Quack!Comment
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AND IT'S A BUNCH OF FUCKING BULLSHIT !!
Statin drugs kill, you dumb fuck, because lowering cholesterol is deadly...
Cholesterol is the substance the body uses for healing, hence high levels following a cardiovascular event...
Peoples that are known for their longevity and low incidents of cardiovascular problems typically have cholesterol levels over 300...
Statin drugs don't prevent shit...
They only cause problems, including death...Comment
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SOS: Sanity over Statins – CTT the house of statin secrets
by Jerome Burne
Should a professional body, however eminent, be allowed to keep information about the safety of products they are supplying to public hidden so no one else can run tests on them?
That is the question raised by HealthInsightUK’s finding that a large and respected organisation whose job it is to analyses the findings of statin trials – The Cholesterol Treatment Trialists’ (CTT) Collaboration in Oxford – has an agreement to keep secret much of the information contained in its huge database which holds results from 27 trials of these drugs, nearly each of which was run by a drug company.
Questions about the secrecy of the CTT have been put in the spotlight following the recent recommendation by NICE to change the guidelines on statins. If the proposals are accepted, millions more healthy people in the UK who have no sign of heart disease will be prescribed these drugs. A key part of the evidence supporting this proposal was a study by CTT published in the Lancet in 2012.
HealthInsightUK has also established that the CTT do not hold data on the side-effects of statins. A spokesman confirmed that they base their estimate of risk on the published results of trials conducted by the drug companies. He dismissed claims that side-effects such as muscle pain and depression were wide spread, saying they were only “hypotheses”.
Denied access to data
This could explain why the CTT has regularly reported a much lower rate of side-effects than trials run by independent researchers. Knowing the true rate of side-effects is particularly important with statins because many patients have to take them for one to benefit. If the estimate of side effects is too low the benefits may not outweigh the risks.
Concern about the secrecy surrounding CTT’s data is not new. Dr Jim Wright editor of the highly respected and independent journal Canadian Therapeutics Initiative which analyses drug studies has described how several years ago he had tried and failed to get access to statin data held by CTT.
“They had agreed someone from my team could have access to their data, although the researcher would have to go to Oxford to see it. However after travelling 6000 miles, they were told that the data was not available.”
This is just an anecdote but many others have since reported the same thing. The latest concern about access to CTT data was triggered last year when the Cochrane Collaboration – famed for its rigorous assessment of the benefit of drugs and other treatments – produced a report saying that statins should be more widely used on people without heart disease. The report was heavily based on the CTT Lancet study. Was it actually possible to check their findings?
Everyone wanted the data
A number of senior researchers approached by HealthInsight have supported Dr Wright’s claim that the data held by CTT hasn’t been available. Professor Rita Redberg cardiologist and editor of the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, has stated in an email that: “CTT will not make their data available to any colleagues and other researchers who wish to study risks and benefits of statins. The CTT data is not accessible publicly.”
“I have not requested access to the CTT data,’ says Dr David H. Newman, Director of Clinical Research, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York.
‘However, I’m not aware of anyone who has gained access to these data, which speaks volumes since everyone has wanted it. For the science to be considered even potentially credible, another independent group will have to replicate their analysis.”
Professor Harriet Rosenberg of the Health and Society Program at York University in Toronto commented that: “many scholars have asked the CTT for data without success” in a formal reply to the Cochrane review last year.
The response by the CTT when such individual claims are made is to say that anyone with a well formulated proposal can get access to their data. But emails seen byHeathinsightUK throw doubt on that. They were exchanged between one of CTT’s top researchers Professor Colin Baigent and an Australian TV journalist researching a story about statins.
The secret agreement
She asked him several times if researchers could get access to their data. At first he said that all proposals of a high scientific standard would be considered. But pushed further this is how he responded:
“The CTT secretariat has agreement with the principle investigators of the trials, and in those instances where trial data were provided directly by the drug manufacturers with the companies themselves, that individual trial data will not be released to third parties. Such an agreement was necessary in order that analyses of the totality of the available trial data could be conducted by the CTT Collaboration.”
In other words we’ve agreed that some data won’t be released. A little background to the CTT makes Baigent’s statement clearer and explains some of the other mysteries surrounding this very influential body staffed largely by epidemiologists and statisticians.
It was formed in 1994, right at the beginning of the statin era, with the idea of gathering together trials from all the different manufacturers so they could perform large scale analyses of benefits and risks, rather than building up an evidence base one study at a time. Baigent’s claim is that without agreeing to this confidentiality the CTT would never have been able to do their very large analyses.
Secret data no longer acceptable
Twenty years ago there wasn’t the same degree of skepticism about drug companies and their readiness to play fast and loose with data for commercial ends. Today there is a general feeling that relying on company trials without their data being open to third part scrutiny is unacceptable.
Professor Rosenberg in her response to the Cochrane review remarked that the CTT “rely heavily on industry-sponsored trials” and asked the authors whether because of this they had asked for any raw data from CTT. (Published articles about a trial are a brief summary of 100,000s pages if raw data which contain details of what happened to each individual patient.)
The reply from the lead researcher made it clear that like the others he believed that such an approach would have been a waste of time. “We are aware that attempts to obtain individual patient data from CTT does not appear to be feasible.’ He added that they didn’t need it for their systematic review.
No information on side effects
So there seems a pretty strong case for saying that for all practical purposes the drug company trials held by the CTT are not available for independent scrutiny.
The situation with side-effects appears to be even more unsatisfactory. CTT papers regularly find that those in the placebo group have about the same rate of side-effects as those getting the drug. The figure given in their most recent 2012 report puts the incidence of serious muscle damage, the main one mentioned, at about 1 in 10,000. But this is wildly at odds with the reports of individual physicians and independent clinical trials which find that as many as one in ten patients have problems.
In an attempt to discover how the gap can be so large Professor Rosenberg asked the authors of the Cochrane statin review whether the CTT actually held any side effect data. “It’s not clear if the AE (adverse events) data was withheld from the Cochrane reviewers,” she wrote “or were not collected in the original trials.”
Lead author of the review Dr Shah Ebrahim didn’t know either. “Full disclosure of all the adverse events by type and allocation from the RCTs is now really needed,” he replied “as the CTT does not seem to have these data.”
Scale of side effects still not clear
This is remarkable. Twenty years after these drugs were first introduced and after they have been prescribed to hundreds of millions of people, two leading experts don’t know where the side effect information is stored that would allow researchers to make an accurate estimate of risk. And only now is there talk of “full disclosure of all adverse events.”
In an interview Professor Baigent confirmed that the CTT did not actually hold any side-effect data. The reason, he said, was that when the CTT was set up one of its key aims was to investigate the risk of death from statins. At the time people were concerned that lowering cholesterol might cause an increase in deaths from suicide, cancer or other causes not connected with heart disease.
So when requesting raw data from the companies the CTT only asked for anything about death. As a result their data base doesn’t have any information on side effects. He added: “We are now planning to look at other adverse effects and will soon be collecting the data.” This is for drugs that have been available for so long that the patents for most have run out.
So how had they arrived at their conclusions that the risks of taking statins were very low? “The individual trials run by the companies have published their own results and that has allowed us to establish the level of risk.”
Reports of side effects just hypotheses
But what about the many patient reports of problems such as muscle pain or cataracts or depression? “These claims are based on unreliable studies,” says Baigent. “They are just hypotheses at this point. They haven’t been tested in randomised clinical trials. We know about the risks from individual studies and we do hold the data that shows statins benefit primary patients (without heart disease).”
So what needs to be done? Critics of the way the CTT operates point to the stand taken by a different group of Cochrane reviewers who were assessing the benefits of the anti-flu drug Tamiflu several years ago. They asked the manufacturer Roche to see the raw data about what happened to individual patients. When the company refused to supply it they reported they could not asses the drug as they didn’t have enough evidence to make a judgement.
“The same thing needs to happen with statins,” says Dr John Abramson, a physician at Harvard Medical School. “Access to patient-level data is similarly necessary for Cochrane reviewers of statin therapy so they can perform a thorough and independent evaluation. At the very least we need an independent analysis of all the trials to find out if patients getting statins have fewer serious adverse events than those on a placebo.”
“The Tamiflu review has set a new standard,” agrees BMJ editor Fiona Godlee,. “From now on that is what people will, and should, expect – conclusions based on access to the full data that can be validated by others who also have access to the full data.”
Refusing access to data not wrong
However it’s not at all clear that this will necessarily change the way the CTT works. At the moment, Godlee says she can’t see that CTT have done anything wrong. “Their arrangement is by no means ideal, and doesn’t help them or the Cochrane review group when they are challenged about their interpretation of the data. It would be much better if they were able to share the individual patient data but the fact that they have not done this is, in my view, acceptable by current standards.”
The problem, Abramson explains, is that current standards place more importance on industry’s claim that it owns the data than the public’s need for accurate information. “What’s needed is a campaign to educate physicians and the public what serious consequences hiding data has on quality of medical care.”
It’s hard to think of another industry where the solution to standard practices that were putting clients at risk of sickness and death was an awareness program.
”So the question remains: Should a professional body, however eminent, be allowed to keep data on clinical trials hidden so they and no one else can evaluate the benefits of the products those trials were testing?Comment
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What the fuck do statin drugs have to do with the racist murdering Ferguson KKK-PD?
Eat Us And Smile
Cenk For America 2024!!
Justice Democrats
"If the American people had ever known the truth about what we (the BCE) have done to this nation, we would be chased down in the streets and lynched." - Poppy Bush, 1992Comment
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Adverts for quack snakeoil salesmen.
I've removed them.Comment
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