The Terrifyingly Tiny Effect of Statin Drugs

If you have heart disease and take a statin drug to lower your cholesterol, how much longer will you live – a few more years? A couple of extra months? Or can you count the difference in days?

We already know that statin manufacturers use imaginative statistical tricks to make a 1% reduction in heart attack risk seem impressive, but this is a new angle.

For the first time a recent study looked at all the scientific trials of statin drugs to see how long extra, on average, people lived by taking the drug.

• BMJ Open: The effect of statins on average survival in randomised trials

The result? If people did not have heart disease they lived only 3 days longer on a statin drug – during drug trials that were on average five years long. If they did already have heart disease and took the drug daily for about five years they lived… 4 days longer.

The cost of these 4 extra days include the risk of side effects like feeling tired, lack of energy, slightly lowered IQ, muscle pain etc. – every day.

I think potential users of these drugs should be informed of these facts first.

Earlier

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PS

Note that living on average 4 days longer (during a five year trial) could be an over-estimation. These trials are funded by the drug companies and only 11 of 27 trials have released needed data to include them in the analysis. The other 16 trials tended to have less impressive benefits to the participants, according to the review.

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