Statin use vs. death rate from cardiovascular diseases (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Statin use vs. death rate from cardiovascular diseases (2019)

ourworldindata.org

20 pointsjs25 comments

A remarkably strong signal to my naieve eyes. These drugs appear to do what they claim.

Most people I know in my age group 65+ who take them complain of minor issues like biliousness. Most of us grumble about something. If I owned a lawn I would ask you to get off it. I wouldn't blame the statins for that: I don't take 'em, I got a clean calcium score. Reading I see there is a paradoxical increase in hard calcium deposits for some statin takers, but presumably it stabilises and stroke risk drops regardless. Or maybe not regardless or paradoxical: maybe this is how statins do the beneficial thing?

I see quite the opposite. On the left side of the plot, for countries with the lowest cvd rates, there is a whole range of dosages for statins. In other words, countries with low and high statin usage have low death rates from cardiovascular disease.

Diet & lifestyle? Leftmost Low statin has some high fish intake high veg diet. But probably not low salt. Far right has some high salt, high smoking rate econs. I selected AU, NZ and UK to compare as high health budget, high statin use. average Western diet to AR,UY which have good health systems, meat dominated, lower statin and see a weaker but present horizontal separation.

Maybe I'm being to optimistic about the signal. I do tend to a default position of belief in western medical science consensus and it tends to "take statins if old" according to "big statin" funded pop science at least.

But no country with high statin use has high death rates.

You can have low death rates without using statins, but using statins does prevent high death rates.

Or countries with enough money for statins also can afford other interventions. Or whatever.

Eastern Europe shines here. Statins have very bad rep here while diet is pretty heavy on pork, etc.

Most popular ad on TV is gastric relief meds and joint pain killer gels (because pills are bad, mmmkay).

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