Word: statin
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...will take a while to catch on, but that should only further motivate this effort. When statistics consistently show that lifestyle and diet changes are more effective than any medicine, a patient should be happy with a prescription for a 30-minute run and cardamom roasted cauliflower with his statin any day. It’s a marriage worth fighting for.—Columnist Rebecca A. Cooper can be reached at cooper3@fas.harvard.edu...
...even there, Vytorin failed to show much effect. Vytorin is actually the combination of two drugs - one of the early statin medications, simvastatin (also known as Zocor), made by Merck, and ezetimibe, or Zetia, made by Schering-Plough. Ezetimibe is the first cholesterol-lowering medication that works by blocking absorption of cholesterol in the gut, rather than regulating the fat's production in the liver, like other statins do. ENHANCE compared the effect of Vytorin to simvastatin alone, and showed little difference between the two medications when it came to plaque size in the arteries. Simvastatin came off patent...
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...
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...