In a recent meta-analysis  of 11 studies on statin drugs (cholesterol lowering) involving 65,229 men and women yielding approximately 244,000 person years of follow up and 2,793 deaths, statin drugs were observed to be of no benefit (3.7 years of use of the statin drug) in reducing mortality, even in the high risk primary prevention population.

This refutes the study published in 2007 in the Journal of American Medicine, called the Jupiter Study, that claimed individuals with low cholesterol and a C-reactive protein (inflammation marker) could have a reduced risk of up to 20% on mortality.

The study concludes there is no evidence that prescribing cholesterol lowering drugs known as statins to patients at risk of heart disease, will reduce mortality rates.

What you are not being told by your medical or pharmaceutical representative is that not only is there no significance of reduced mortality in high risk populations (high LDL, high C-Reactive protein), there are many side effects that are very dangerous and potentially lethal associated with statin drugs.  The most obvious is liver/kidney dysfunction and serious musculoskeletal damage.

So if there is “little evidence that statins reduce the risk of dying from any cause in individuals without heart disease” and there are serious risk factors of the drug, who’s really benefiting?

The drug companies.

In fact NNT (the numbers needed to treat) which is an epidemiological measurement to asses the effectiveness of health care intervention proves our point.  In this study the NNT was 321 over a 3.7 year period.  This means that for every one that benefited from statins, 320 did not, while all are paying about $1000/year.

So who’s paying: you the consumer, the client or the tax payer; until we realize that healing does not come from a pill but in changes in our essential habits.

In Health & Service,

Dr. Roland Phillips Jr.,BA, BS, D.C.