Do cholesterol lowering drugs do any good? Thats a good question ...

What about other statins? Lets take a look at Crestor in the JUPITER trial. Crestor advertises a risk reduction in heart attack and stroke of 47%. Thats the relative risk reduction. But what about the absolute risk reduction? In the table 1 endpoints of the JUPITER study, sure enough, you will find 47% relative risk reduction for combined heart attack, stroke, and death from CV causes. But scan a few figures to the right and on the same line you will see that 120 people had to take the drug for 1.9 years to spare one person an event.

What about crestor on just stroke. Well, 288 people had to take Crestor for almost 2 years to spare one person a stroke.

Keep in mind that whenever a product is for sale its normal overstate the benefits in order to score a sale. Statin drugs are no exception to this.

Bobby what is the difference between relative and absolute reduction please?

Neil,

Relative Risk Reduction compares the placebo group to the statin group, without taking into account how many people had to take the drug to get the results. In other words if you reduce cardiac events from 2% down to 1%, thats a 50% relative reduction in events. But you only saved one guy per 100 people taking the drug.

Absolute risk reduction takes into account how many people had to be treated to save one person from an event. If 100 people take the drug, and cardiac events are reduced from 2% down to 1%, only one guy was spared an event, or an Absolute risk reduction of 1%

The inverse of the Absolute risk reduction is called NUMBER NEEDED TO TREAT or NNT. It simply asks the question "how many people have to take this drug for one person to benefit?

In my sample above the relative risk reduction is 50% while the absolute risk reduction is only 1%, therfore the number needed to treat (NNT) is 100.

Here is a link to a recent article in Business Week magazine that explains it. Once you grasp this, the drug companies can't pull the wool over your eyes.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_04/b4068052092994.htm

bobby . . . . . great info for everyone . . .men/women . . .young or older. Since I am a victim of Lipitor . . . my mission is to ban statins and of course, tell everyone how the drs. and the drug co's have a HUGE racket about the anti-cholesterol drugs. . . . WHAT A FARCE !!! . . . so many people suffer . . .WHAT A SHAME !!!