Should Those Who Have Normal Cholesterol Levels Take Statin Drugs?

Some in the pharmaceutical drug and medical industries believe people who do not have high cholesterol should take statin drugs. To reveal this thinking, let me share two startling pieces of news that may have slipped quickly by you recently.

1. Doctor suggests that statin drugs be put in drinking water. The doctor says if you have a normal cholesterol level you should take the drug... whether or not you have high cholesterol. This was suggested about four years ago by a British medical expert.
2. Healthy people can take statin drugs if they have good cholesterol levels but still have high levels of C-reactive protein in their blood. The New England Journal of Medicine, November 20, 2008 edition reports on a study aiming to show just that. It is called the JUPITER study (see New England Journal Of Medicine 359:2195-2207).

You know how these studies go. They are developed and executed at great costs. Clinical research in developing these substances costs fortunes in laboratory time and materials. Research takes money, but these research-sponsoring companies never lose. They know how to make back their money - they sell the drugs. In this case, they are finding more ways (a bigger market) for statins. This is strong evidence that the high cholesterol war threatens not only those who have the condition but everyone else. Why would they want you to take a drug when you are not sick?

Just like the Aspirin-Heart-Attack Scare!

Everybody should have heard by now that aspirin can prevent you from having a heart attack. Well, here is a direct quote from Chapter 2 of my ebook, How to Win the High Cholesterol War. "Over two hundred people need to be taking aspirin in order to prevent heart attack.

Did you see that? Do you know what that means? In order to have one success story (statistically speaking), the number of persons needing to be on aspirin for a number of years is 208. Put another way, in order to use aspirin to prevent one person from having a heart attack, you need to let 208 people take it simultaneously for the same period of time. You will not hear that from statistic mentioned - hardly anywhere. You can just imagine what the NNT for other drugs such as lipitor, pravachol, etc are. I have never heard a pharmacist or physician mentioned the number needed to treat statistic.

What about statins? Do they prevent heart attacks?

Let the numbers speak for themselves. Statins lower cholesterol and impair liver function. Statistically, if one person with high cholesterol is to avoid having a heart attack by taking statin drugs, then there needs to be 50 such persons on the drug for the same reason. That means, 1 in 50 persons with high cholesterol and who take statins in order to prevent a heart attack will benefit from their regimen. The others may (or may not) have heart attacks regardless.

It is guaranteed that 50 persons following the suggestions I have given in How to Win the High Cholesterol War will do much better than that. Still, we hear the common verbal post mortem about someone (like the late Tim Russert) that their cholesterol was under control. Half the number of heart attack victims have "normal" or "controlled" cholesterol levels. This says something...

Obviously, lowering cholesterol does not solve the problem. Lower cholesterol is not the answer to stemming the epidemic. Why then try to sell us more drug that does not prevent the problem? Why not correctly identify the problem and tell people how to really get well... better still, how to prevent getting sick? Would that hurt the sale of these popular drugs?