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Comment by village-idiot | Hacker News Reader

For the life of me I really don’t understand why the regulators haven’t clamped down on statins. Sure, it lowers your cholesterol, but unless if you’re in a very specific population it doesn’t move your all cause mortality risk one iota. All while costing the patient money and causing some pretty nasty side effects too.

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Probably because most data disagree with this comment. There's a ~20% relative risk reduction in vascular events & mortality per ~40 mg/dL decrease in LDL.

The CTT is probably the best summary of these data: https://www.cttcollaboration.org/

> "~20% relative risk reduction in vascular events & mortality per ~40 mg/dL decrease in LDL."

Is that a composite endpoint of vascular events AND mortality?

From TheNNT:

"It takes 5 years of daily statin therapy to achieve a 1.6% chance of avoiding a heart attack, and a 0.37% chance of avoiding a stroke. Most disappointing, statins seem unable to prevent death in this group. And most concerning, the drugs may increase diabetes, a serious and life-altering disease." (Primary Prevention)

http://www.thennt.com/nnt/statins-for-heart-disease-preventi...

That would be the same CTT that makes money from the makers of Statins and has been accused of being insufficiently transparent around their studies[0].

0 http://www.drjohnm.org/2014/06/growing-doubt-on-statin-drugs...

> but unless if you’re in a very specific population it doesn’t move your all cause mortality risk one iota

Have you got a link to some relevant research?

Sure do! I typically defer to Mark Sisson for this kind of stuff, who’s very good at linking in relevant research.

https://www.marksdailyapple.com/the-evidence-continues-to-mo...

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