Time to stop statin treatment!

January 2016

Do you know that on average statin treatment is unable to prolong your life by more than a few days. This was what Danish researchers found out after having analysed all statin trials, where the authors had recorded the total number of deaths. You can read more about it in Canada Free Press. The very article is freely available in BMJ Open. Open

A curious fact is, that the authors of several statin trials haven´t told about the total number of deaths in their reports. Why not? Most likely because there was no difference between the treatment group and the untreated control group. Or perhaps because more had died in the treatment group? Instead they have reported the number of ”heart events”, a diagnosis open for many interpretations and statistical manipulations. You can red more about that issue in The People´s Pharmacy.

About a year ago Professor Harumi Okuyama,  published a paper in Expert Review of Clinical Pharmacology together with six coauthors. (Three of the authors, including Professor Okuyama, are members of THINCS). In that paper they presented strong evidence that statin treatment may cause both atherosclerosis and heart failure. As you probably know there has been an epidemic rise of heart failure during the last 10-15 years, most of all in the US, and their information strengthen the view that the cause is the widespread use of statin drugs.

In 2004 new penal regulations on clinical trials came into effect in the EU. It was decided that no drug trial could be published unless the trial directors had reported about it before its start. In figure 1 of the paper by Okayama and coworkers the authors have shown that although the trials reported that statins were effective in lowering LDL-C, no significant benefits were observed in the trials published after 2004. The only conclusion from that finding must be that the drug companies have  only published trials with a positive outcome.

These findings should have stopped statin treatment immediately, but nothing has happened, although their paper was published almost a year ago, and although it has been observed and  commented by many. A search on Google with the title of the paper results in more than 1300 hits! Read for instance the article published in Express a few weeks ago.

In my November Newsletter I told you about the paper by Edward Archer, where he described the many errors that are associated with studies of people´s diet. Luckily the press has been more and more critical to the dietary recommendations. For instance, you can now read about Archer´s paper in Washington Post and in Medical Express.

If you haven´t seen Justin Smith´s revealing video $tatin Nation, you can now buy both part 1 and part 2 as DVDs. A life-saving gift to those of your friends or family, who are on statin treatment.