Re: NYT article on diabetes T2

Jackie Patti <jpatti@xxxxxxxx> wrote in part:


But... I'm just NOT gonna decide my expertise on these medications
trumps my cardiologist's if the best anti-statin argument is "people on
the internet said it was bad."

You got it.

I read the piece by Eades that you cited, re relative risk. I disagree with
him only on the idea that researchers use relative risk to frighten
potential pill-takers. They use it because many times the relative risk
reduction is constant even as the absolute risk varies all over the place
from population to population, over time periods, etc.

With statins, there are enough data now to say that a statin will reduce the
probability that you will have a cardiovascular "outcome" over the next 5 to
ten years or so by about 30-35%. That seems to hold *regardless* of your
absolute level of risk.

So...should a healthy 20-year-old with no family history of heart disease
take a statin? Well, they get all the risks of muscle damage, possible
cognitive problems, maybe neuropathies and other ills if the worst skeptics
are right. And in return they get a 33% reduction in their probability of a
baddie. With an absolute probability of that baddie being 0.000001 over the
next 10 years, there's no way they should take the statin.

Now consider a 45-year-old woman with diabetes and a prior heart attack and
a CABG. You do the math.

If I were in your shoes, I wouldn't be satisfied with pravastatin; I'd
probably press my doc for simvastatin. Like pravastatin, it's available as a
generic (the expensive trade name version is Zocor).


Hubby used to do all that - caving and rapelling and whanot. My
attempts to join him in this hobby were unsuccessful as it turns out I'm
a complete wuss.

You're calling *me* a wimp, too, BTW... ;-)
--
Jim Chinnis Warrenton, Virginia, USA
.

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