Healthcare Researchers Dispute Lipitor and Cholesterol Guidelines
According to the Washington Post, physicians who wrote guidelines aimed at preventing heart attacks and strokes are having to defend against strong criticism that the guidelines overestimate the risk for certain groups of people. The formula would allegedly expand the number of people who would be considered for cholesterol-lowering drugs like Lipitor, Zocor or their generic forms.
The doctors who drafted the advice for the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology claim that any flaws in their formula are small. However, in an opinion piece in the British journal Lancet, Paul Ridker and Nancy Cook, physicians at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, describe how they tried the formula on patients in three large, observational clinical trials and found that it was way off in terms of the number of heart attacks and strokes those patients actually had.
Under the new guidelines, one-third of U.S. adults ages 40 to 75 would meet the standards to take a statin. “Under the current guidelines, statins are recommended for only about 15 percent of this group,” the Post reported.
“The predicted risk is roughly twice as high as the observed risk,” Paul Ridker said, according to the Post.
Drugs like Lipitor work by preventing an enzyme in the liver from creating low-density lipids. However, the drug has been linked to Type 2 diabetes in women. Despite this issue, Lipitor manufacturer Pfizer continues to aggressively market and sell the product.
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