Thursday, April 10, 2008
Misleading report of cholesterol-lowering regimen
What you read in the newspapers is often written by mindless reporters. Take the recent headline “Diabetics May Cut Risks by Lowering Cholesterol, Blood Pressure.” Actually, the scientific study showed that diabetics may lower a marker for risk, blood cholesterol, but not actually lower their risk for a heart attack. The goal of the study was to examine what would happen if, by using certain drugs, and lowering LDL cholesterol to 70 milligrams per deciliter compared with the previous target goal of 100, if there would be any health benefits.
The “amount of fatty plaque in the arteries leading to the brain (carotid arteries) decreased among patients getting the added treatment,” said Michelle Fay Cortez of Blooomberg News. But the researchers measured the thickness of the arteries in the carotids as evidence for plaque, which is a questionable test that doesn’t equate with mortality.
Elizabeth G. Nabel MD, director of the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute, chimed in to say: "This study provides good news for adults with type 2 diabetes. These patients are two to four times more likely than people without diabetes to die from heart disease. For the first time, we have evidence that aggressively lowering LDL cholesterol and blood pressure can actually reverse damage to the arteries in middle-aged adults with diabetes."
But this is totally false, there were not fewer deaths, only fewer assumed deaths based upon the markers for the disease. The study only lasted 3 years, not sufficient time to determine if mortality was truly reduced. The study itself said: “Clinical events were lower than expected and did not differ significantly between groups.” There was no difference in the heart attack rate between the aggressively and standard-treated groups! There were more adverse events in the aggressively treated group of patients, attributed to blood-pressure controlling drugs also used in the study along with anti-cholesterol drugs. [Journal American Medical Assn. 2008; 299(14):1678-1689]
Labels: cholesterol, mortality
posted by Knowledge of Health at 7:45 AM
