Word: heartly
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That grim situation could have been avoided, researchers say. An estimated 12 million American women are routinely prescribed statins, which carry a risk of serious side effects. Yet there is little evidence that they prevent heart disease in women. In past research, statin therapy has been shown to prolong the lives of people with heart disease. It has also been shown to stave off the onset of heart disease in healthy at-risk adults. But researchers who have broken out and analyzed the data on healthy female patients in these trials found that the lifesaving benefit, which extends...
...smaller group of women - those who already have heart disease - the data suggests that statins can reduce heart-related deaths. But as Dr. Beatrice Golomb, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego, says, they don't reduce deaths overall. "Any reduction in death from heart disease seen in the data has been completely offset by deaths from other causes," she says. Which raises the question: If statins do not help prolong women's lives, why are so many women taking them...
...excluded from clinical drug trials - an attempt to protect pregnant women from harm and avoid the potentially confounding effects of women's hormone fluctuations. Since then, as studies have actively recruited women, gender-based research has begun to reveal crucial information about how the development of diseases - such as heart disease, lung cancer and autoimmune disorders - may affect women in markedly different ways from...
Even acknowledging the lack of data, however, researchers like Dr. Scott Grundy of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas have long argued that statins should be prescribed to women at moderately high risk for heart disease. Grundy says the underrepresentation of women in drug trials does not discount statins' benefit; it results only in a failure to show a statistically significant effect. Grundy was one of the authors of the 2001 national guidelines for lowering cholesterol and the 2004 revisions that greatly expanded the use of statins - and were criticized because of his and other authors' ties...
...effectiveness of the statin Crestor (rosuvastatin) with that of a placebo in healthy patients. The study, which ended in 2008, involved nearly 18,000 participants - including 6,801 women, more than in any previous statin trial - who had high levels of C-reactive protein, a risk factor for heart disease, but did not have high cholesterol...