Word: zocor
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Segal was one of 24 million people taking drugs to lower cholesterol in the U.S. that year. The workhorse of American medicine, statins - first sold in the U.S. in 1987 and marketed under brand names like Lipitor, Zocor and Crestor - are designed to clear away LDL cholesterol, the waxy buildup that can clog arteries and trigger heart attacks and strokes. Doctors say the majority of current statin users are healthy people who don't have heart disease but who, like Segal, simply have high cholesterol. Use among this group, known as the primary prevention population, has made these drugs...
...cholesterol numbers are drawn from an advertisement for the statin Zocor - a drug that the authors are careful not to dismiss out of hand, since it can indeed save lives, just not as many as its makers would like you to believe. The ad openly touts the 42% figure, which is based on a study in which 111 out of 2,221 people with heart disease who used Zocor later died of a heart attack. In a control group of heart patients who used a placebo, 189 out of 2,223 died. So the fact is there were indeed...
...gone well before the 10-year threshold is reached. Now imagine a new technology that spots early signs of the disease at age 57. If everyone gets the test, the 10-year survival rate soars to 100%, but no one in fact lives a single day longer. As with Zocor, early CT scans and early detection may in fact make a difference in how long someone lives, but in order to determine how big that difference is, you need to peel back the numbers and look more closely at individual cases...
...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...
STATINS The more than 10 million Americans who take statin drugs to lower cholesterol may be enjoying some unexpected benefits. New studies suggested that regularly taking medicines like Lipitor, Lescol, Pravachol and Zocor may halve a patient's risk of developing colon and advanced prostate cancers while reducing their risk of pancreatic and esophageal cancers more than 50%. Another study showed that patients who aren't on statins can cut their risk of death following a heart attack more than 50% if they take them before hospitalization and within 24 hours after the attack. Doctors think the cholesterol- and inflammation...