A group of researchers at Imperial College London recently cross-referenced a couple of studies on heart health and have made an interesting recommendation to fast food outlets: rather than fries, each order should come with a free statin drug. A dose of statins, they reason, reduce heart attack risk to about the same degree that a cheeseburger and shake raise the risk. In effect, the two should neatly cancel each other out.Take two cheeseburgers and call me in the morning.
In a paper recently published in the American Journal of Cardiology, the researchers point out that it's somewhat backward that fast food restaurants are giving away stuff that's horrible for you but that statins generally require a prescription. The cost of statins has fallen sharply in recent years such that a small statin dose would cost the vendors about the same as a packet of ketchup.
Friday, August 13, 2010
Would You Like Fries With That? And a Lipitor?
The food police may have finally given up trying to get you to eat healthy food. Now they're proposing that when you get that greasy cheeseburger at the fast food joint (that you're going to buy despite their nagging) that the food servers also give you a cholesterol reducing drug:
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4 comments:
If people really took the time to understand statistics, they wouldn't worry about taking Statins or radically reducing their intake of healthy foods.
Whenever you are prescribed a pill, you should ask what the 'number needed to treat (NNT)' is. Anything with an NNT over 50 is worse than a lottery ticket. Several recent scientific papers peg the NNT for statins at 250 and up for lower-risk patients, even if they take it for five years or more.
So to prevent one person from having a heart attack, 249 otherwise healthy people have to take the drug religiously for five years.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_04/b4068052092994_page_2.htm
This is why Obamacare is so dangerous. Pills with relatively little value will be prescribed to millions of people with little practical result. A huge transfer of wealth to the drug companies.
This study also inadvertently demonstrated how unlikely it is for a cheeseburger and fries to actually harm you. But saying so is not politically correct.
If this is the case with restaurants dispensing such a drug, then I would suppose they will have to have a Doctor on staff to dispense the drug, otherwise they would be in violation of a number of codes/laws.
Personally I'd rather be offered a glass of red wine with my Big Mac; better for you and tastes good too.
Bob is absolutely right about the NNT issue. Having just finished chemo for breast cancer and told I now have a 94% cure rate, I was offered an oestrogen crushing drug to be taken for the next 10 years to add 0-3% to my cure rate. Mind you this drug is totally ineffective for 66% of the women who take it, and causes serious side effects to 30% of the patients.
I politely said "no thank you."
The concept of NNT is a bit confusing in that the length of the trial is extremely low relative to the individual risk of suffering the affliction being tested. Even the notion one can say that any individual did not have an 'event' because of the medication is specious. Only in long term studies with control groups would statistics deliver reliable analytic information.
As if this failing of testing is not enough, consider the reality that cell production requires cholesterol. Thus if cholesterol is reduced precipitously one would expect failing health as crucial cells are not replaced as required. One interesting example is low testosterone while taking statins. While there are plenty of examples where low testosterone would be beneficial, that is a subject for another forum!
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