Transcription
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 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 Zocor or Lavallo, Pravastatin, 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 9%. For, uh, myocardial infarction, a heart attack, they reduce it by 29%. Still not 36%, 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 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 an absolute risk reduction of 0.8%, which is almost background noise. For heart attack, it's 1.3%. Yeah, not very impressive. What if the Lipitor ad had said that, "We lower your risk of a heart attack by 1.3%. Pay your $25 a month copay and reap the benefits." And or for stroke, it turns out to be 0.4% 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%. 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% 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 counter. I also included another link to another article showing that it's very common for up to 25% 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 statin's 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 effect 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.