Back to Cholesterol

I'm sure you all heard the big news about how lowering the cholesterol in healthy individuals decreased the risk of heart disease by 44%. As a researcher, I have to look at the numbers. What does this really mean and is it really significant. This data comes from the JUPITER study (Justification for the Use of statins in Primary prevention: an Intervention Trial Evaluating Rosuvastatin{Crestor})

The drug companies would have you believe that in fact this is highly significant. Why? Because there is more money in it for them. Look at the name of the study, it was a justification study. You may remember a few months ago when the news was to give statin drugs to children. Why? A new market for the pharmaceutical companies to make money.

Now with this new research, the push will be to lower cholesterol levels even more which means that everyone should be taking statin drugs. These are not safe drugs to be taking and there are other ways to accomplish the desired effect. More on this later.

Let's talk about what the numbers mean. Many of you have heard that you can make statistics say anything. So here is what the numbers actually were. There were a total of 17,000 participants in the study. In the non-treatment group, 14 in 1000 developed heart disease. This is .014 percent of the group. In the treatment group 8 in 1000 developed heart disease. this is .008 percent of the group. From 14 to 8 is a 44% reduction, but think of what the numbers are telling you. Going from 2 in a million to 1 in a million is a 50% reduction, but is it really significant?

This is not mention what may be the more significant information here. Tune in tomorrow for more and why C-Reactive protein numbers may be the real significance in this study.