Do statin drugs protect you from heart attack & stroke? Do statin drugs prolong life??
Statin drug manufacturers you know statins that are supposed to lower your cholesterol and protect you from heart attack stroke dying those guys they love to make huge promises like take our drug and it’ll decrease your risk of a heart attack by 36 percent take our drug and it’ll lower your risk of dying by 9 or lower your risk of a stroke by 14 percent well turns
Out that’s all bull crap okay and in this video i’m going to talk about some new research that was just published in the journal of the american and medical association’s internal medicine journal it is a meta-analysis of multiple other studies that looked at this question and the numbers that i’m about to reveal to you may surprise you and most assuredly are going
To piss you off especially if you’ve been paying a copay and taking a statin for years and years and perhaps suffering from statin side effects for over a decade because you thought you were getting a 36 reduction in your risk of having a heart attack i’m dr ken berry a family physician let’s talk about this new statin study and how it’s another nail in the statin
Coffin so this new study was published in jama’s internal medicine journal in mid-march of 2022 it is a systematic review and meta analysis they looked at lots of different studies for which the data is publicly available what you may not know is that a lot of statin companies they fund their own research but then they also keep the results private they do not
Share the results with definitely not with you the public but also they don’t even share it with other researchers with medical institutions they keep this as proprietary information that smells a little fishy doesn’t it but these researchers were able to find 21 trials of statin drugs with regards to their ability to lower your risk of dying or having a heart
Attack or having a stroke that the data was actually publicly available or they were able to get a hold of it and so many of the statins trials they want to talk about soft endpoints like cardiovascular events that’s a subjective measure that doctors can say yes or no to it’s not a black and white hard endpoint dying that’s a hard endpoint having a documented
Heart attack that’s a hard endpoint having a documented stroke that’s a hard endpoint and so this study looked at just those three hard endpoints that nobody can deny either you died or you didn’t die right and so when we look at the research based on those three hard endpoints we find some very different numbers than you might have seen in the advertisements for
Lipitor or zoco or zocor or lavallo pravistatin or others in all there were more than 143 000 different participants in all these studies when you put them together and when you look at the ability of a statin to protect you from heart attack stroke or death by lowering your ldl cholesterol these researchers found that there was no consistent relationship between
Lowering ldlc with a statin and your risk of death heart attack or stroke yeah no consistent relationship in this graph i think it really sums up the results of this study very clearly and it also shows you immediately how the drug companies love to mislead you with relative risk reduction versus absolute risk reduction now you see these tall light gray bars
On the graph these are the relative risk reduction and so for more overall mortality your risk of dying statins by lowering your ldlc reduce it by nine percent for uh myocardial infarction a heart attack they reduce it by 29 still not 36 percent is it and then for stroke they reduce your relative risk by 14 now that’s the number they advertise that’s the number
They tell doctors and that’s the number you wind up hearing oh so if i take a statin every day for years and years and years pay the coffe co-pays suffer the side effects then i’m but it’s okay because i’m going to have a one-third reduced risk of having a heart attack right now pay more careful attention to this graph look at the very tiny little bars that are
Beside each one of the tall bars so for mortality when you look at the absolute risk reduction we’re talking about a an absolute risk reduction of 0.8 percent which is almost background noise for heart attack it’s 1.3 percent yeah not very impressive what if the lipitor ad had said that we lower your risk of a heart attack by 1.3 percent pay your 25 a month copay
And reap the benefits and or for stroke it turns out to be 0.4 percent absolute risk reduction by taking a statin drug every single day for years and years and years you’re literally going to lower your risk by 0.4 percent not even a 1 absolute reduction now keep in mind that by taking a statin drug every single day you’re going to be lowering your testosterone
Level which is a bad thing for men and for women you’re going to be raising your blood sugar levels which is a bad thing for all humans you’re going to be lowering your levels of coenzyme q10 and you’re going to be increasing your risk of having severe muscle aches even muscle breakdown liver damage and a whole host of other side effects now some doctors will
Say no no the side effects are not that bad but let me just tell you a lawyer is looking for a juicy tasty class action lawsuit they don’t chase drugs that don’t have lots of bad side effects another thing to keep in mind is that all the trials that were included in this meta-analysis were conceived by the drug companies were designed by the drug companies were
Performed by researchers that were being paid in some degree by the drug companies were interpreted by researchers who were either on salary for the drug companies or had received a grant by the drug company and then were published all the expenses incurred from that by the drug companies so i wonder what the actual number would be if we had an independent
Randomized controlled trial of whether statins lowering your ldlc actually give any benefit whatsoever i would predict that the benefit for your risk of dying having a heart attack or having a stroke would be 0.0 percent from taking a statin if the research were performed by independent researchers now you may be saying well yeah i as a patient as a consumer i
Don’t understand the risk between are the difference between relative risk reduction and absolute risk reduction but my doctor certainly does he or she’s been to medical school well i’ll contrer i also included another link to another article showing that it’s very common for up to 25 percent of survey doctors to have no idea the difference between relative risk
Reduction and absolute risk reduction so no your doctor probably doesn’t understand the difference either and that’s why i encourage you to print out this new article and take it to your doctor at the next visit when your doctor tries to give you a statin i want you to say doctor i understand you’re under the the you think that statins going to decrease my risk
By a third did you know that it only reduces my risk by about one percent is it really worth all the side effects for me to reduce my risk by potentially one percent so these researchers concluded in this meta analysis published in one of the most respected medical journals in the world that the average person taking a statin drug for years and years and years
Receives no clinical benefit whatsoever so i think the time has come to tell it like it is and say unless you have had a previous heart attack a documented heart attack so then you would be taking a statin drug for secondary prevention that’s the only patient who is going to benefit in any meaningful way from taking a statin drug otherwise you can safely throw
Your lipitor crestor zocor lavallo in the garbage where it belongs and stop wasting your time and money and your side effects suffering by taking this pill for days and days and months and months and years and years and it’s not doing you a damn bit of good
Transcribed from video
Statin Deception (Truth about Cholesterol Medicines) New Study!! By KenDBerryMD