Do cholesterol-lowering drugs really reduce your risk of heart attack?
You might have seen the wire story in Monday's N&R about a report at the American Heart Association's meeting in New Orleans about cholesterol-lowering drugs, or statins. As the Bloomberg News Service put it, "AstraZeneca Plc's Crestor [a cholesterol-lowering medication] slashed the risk of heart attack, stroke and death by nearly half in people with normal or low cholesterol in a study, potentially opening a way to save the lives of thousands of seemingly healthy people.”
As is usually the case with medical research, there's more to this research than the headlines, and there are questions the research did not answer.
Maggie Mahar at the Health Beat blog analyzes the issues and raises some points and questions that you really ought to be thinking about, and asking your doctor about, before you run out and ask your doc for a statin prescription you'd need to take for the rest of your life.
