Word: statin
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Recent studies have proved that statins not only control lipids, but are also potent regulators of inflammation - a key cause of lung deterioration. That's what led Joel Schwartz, an epidemiologist studying pollution and lung function, to examine the effects of statins. He and his colleagues looked at data on 803 subjects involved in the ongoing Veterans Administration Normative Aging Study, all of whom had their lung function measured in so-called spirometer-based breathing tests between 1995 and 2005. "It's interesting that we saw such a big effect here," Schwartz says. The statin users showed half the rate...
...Long debated as a concept, the polypill is ready for trial in Australia and New Zealand. A half-pink, half-white tablet manufactured by Dr. Reddy's Laboratories in India, it contains small doses of several well-known medications: aspirin (to prevent blood clots), a statin (to lower cholesterol), and two blood-pressure-lowering agents. When two British researchers pushed the case for the polypill in a 2003 report in the British Medical Journal, they argued that if taken daily by people with vascular disease and those aged over 55, it would cut the incidence of heart attack and stroke...
...idea of NNT is simple enough. Most clinical trials look at how much better people do on a particular medicine compared with how they would do without it or whether they should be on a different medicine. Take statins, drugs that aim to reduce bad cholesterol. A typical trial might give one group of men a statin for, say, five years and give a second group a placebo, or fake pill...
Generally, you will see fewer heart attacks in the statin group (about 30% fewer in one real-world trial). Reducing the risk by a third sounds like a lot, which is one reason many hundreds of thousands of men with no sign of heart disease take statins. But that number is meaningless unless you take into account the percentage of men in both groups who have heart attacks in the first place. If those people represent only a tiny fraction of the two populations, an improvement of 30% isn't much--maybe one heart attack fewer in a group...
...everything, outgoing, concerned and very into her sports; I hope I'm at least a little like her when I hit 65. It's because of Ellie and others like her that I harbor a mild aversion to taking medicines myself. I haven't yet started swallowing the daily statin they say I should be taking now, the daily aspirin, the lycopene for my prostate. Although I prescribe pills every day - mostly for pain relief - my usual advice as I hand over the prescription is "try to get off these as soon as you can." So with this confession...