ZOCOR HEART PRO UK FULL

That doesn't mean people don't get side-effects on statins - it means they get them if they think they're taking a statin, whether they are or not.ĭr Ben Goldacre, one of the authors of the study, talked about the 'nocebo' effect - if you think you might get a side-effect, you're more likely to. It turned out that the number of people experiencing side-effects in the statin arm of the studies was basically identical to the number of side-effects seen with placebo. Another study looked not just at how many people developed side-effects when they were taking statins, but how those figures compared to people who were taking placebo (non-active) in the same trials. He claimed that the scare story was probably killing more people than had been harmed by the scandal which followed the publication of the (now discredited) story on MMR and autism. The response from Professor Rory Collins from Oxford University, one of the UK's top researchers into statins, was swift and damning.

He claimed that 18-20% of people taking statins had side-effects from them, some of them severe. His interpretation was that statins did not save lives in people at low risk of heart disease, and the side-effects of statins had been underestimated. In 2013, an academic from Harvard revisited the findings from the meta-analysis and came up with different conclusions.

In 2014, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) did just that. They suggested that existing guidelines that excluded these patients from being offered statins should be looked at again, with a view to expanding the role of statin treatment. In 2012, the same study group went one stage further, suggesting that a similar-sized benefit applied to people who were at relatively low risk of heart attack and stroke (usually taken as a 10-year risk under 20%). Nobody has ever suggested doctors should stop recommending statin treatment to these patients. The case for statins in people at very high risk of heart attack or stroke - for instance, people who have already had a heart attack or stroke or most people with type 2 diabetes - was already proven. It showed that for every 1 mmol/L that 'bad' LDL cholesterol was lowered using statins, the risk of heart attack, related surgery or stroke was reduced by 21% and the risk of dying by 12%. In 2005, almost every newspaper's front page covered the findings of a meta-analysis (a study combining lots of smaller related studies) involving over 90,000 people taking statins. To sort the fact from the fiction we need to rewind a few years. Together with other, non-independent, replication studies there is a nascent body of evidence for wider validity.As with so many other scare stories, there is a grey area in the middle - and more agreement among the experts than the headlines would suggest.

The results uphold the validity of research using CPRD and QResearch, by providing independent evidence that both datasets produce very similar estimates of treatment effect, leading to the same clinical and policy decisions. Results were also close for individual statins.ĭatabase differences in population characteristics and in data definitions, recording, quality and completeness had minimal impact on key statistical outputs. In case-control analyses patients on statins had a 31% lower odds of death, compared to 39% for QResearch (adjusted OR 0.69, 95% CI 0.63 to 0.75 versus OR 0.61, 95% CI 0.52 to 0.72). In cohort analysis risk of death was lower by 55% for patients on statins, compared to 53% for QResearch (adjusted HR 0.45, 95% CI 0.40 to 0.50 versus 0.47, 95% CI 0.41 to 0.53). We successfully replicated the methods of the original study very closely. The study period was January 1996 to December 2003.

ZOCOR HEART PRO UK FULL

We replicated the original methods and analysed all cause mortality using: (i) a cohort analysis and (ii) a case-control analysis nested within the full cohort.Įlectronic health record databases containing longitudinal patient consultation data from large numbers of general practices distributed throughout the UK.ĬPRD data for 34925 patients with IHD from 224 general practices, compared against previously published results from QResearch for 13,029 patients from 89 general practices. Using the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD), we replicated a published investigation into the effects of statins in patients with ischaemic heart disease (IHD) by a different research team using QResearch. To conduct a fully independent and external validation of a research study based on one electronic health records database, using a different electronic database sampling the same population. Link to fulltext article Abstract Objective

Zocor heart pro uk