Word: zocor
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...enough for Merck shareholders that the firm's top drugs, Zocor and Fosamax, are going off patent over the next three years and that the pipeline looks thin. Now investors may have to stomach another bitter pill. A Texas jury last week awarded $253.5 million to the widow of a man who died after taking the painkiller Vioxx. In the first verdict reached in more than 4,000 liability cases involving the drug--which Merck recalled last year after studies indicated a possible link to heart failure--the award cast doubt on Merck's strategy of fighting each case individually...