Sunday, July 9, 2017

The even newer cholesterol-lowering drug

You may have read about a new injectable cholesterol-lowering drug that’s got everybody all excited because, in a large trial, it lowered LDL (so-called “bad” cholesterol) by 59 percent. Plus it lowered the number of various types of heart attacks by 1.5 percent. Here is what my trusted source, Uffe Ravnskov, M.D., PhD, has to say about this.
  • Based on the trial’s statistics, to prevent one heart attack per year it is necessary to treat 140 patients.
  • Most heart attacks heal with no or few aftereffects.
  • The cost for one year’s treatment is about $14,000, meaning that the cost for preventing one heart attack per year is more than two million dollars.
  • The number of deaths from heart disease and other causes actually increased! Of the 30,000 patients in the trial, 444 of those who were treated with the drug died. Of those who were not treated, 426 died (if the trial had gone on longer, that number may have increased). In other words, the number of heart attacks may have been reduced a bit, but the number of deaths increased.
  • The three main authors of the research paper are employees of Amgen, the drug manufacturer.
Besides, as shown by a systematic study of 69,000 elderly people (over 60), a high level of LDL-cholesterol is beneficial.

As I’ve said many times, our bodies make cholesterol for a reason. I don’t think you should mess with it.

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