Other than aspirin’s statins are probably the most used drug. Some medics want children on them, other lunatics have said put them in the drinking water supply. Statins are a $30 billion world wide industry and we hate them. The benefits are minimal if any, and the side effects are many. So, if you are one of the rare people that benefit from statins, what can you expect to gain ? Well it turns out you may live three months longer. Not much of a benefit, when you consider the many disabling and life threatening side effects that are regularly reported. From Dr.John Briffa’s blog.
"Mathematical and statistical models are unlikely to accurately predict the true outcomes of a treatment, but they’re probably better than guessing. And it turns out that when all the individuals were thrown into the mix statins, on average, allowed individuals to live without cardiovascular disease for an additional 7 months. When it comes to the all-important life expectancy question, this was increased by an average of just 3 months. I did some maths and calculated that this represents an increase in lifespan of about 0.3 per cent.
These last words utterly sum up, I think, how it is in the real world: when individuals are informed about the true facts about the likely benefits, hardly without exception they take a pass. And that’s before we even get to talk about the potential side effects such as fatigue, muscle pain and memory loss."
Dr. Briffa's article here.
Full study here.
Eddie
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