Yet statin use results in 20-30% lower all cause mortality.
The function may not be well understood, but the outcomes are pretty dramatic.
I’ll keep taking the pills until someone explains to me why the vastly lower death rate is somehow a bad thing.
If you set up the standard as a comparison between swallowing a daily pill and doing nothing, you have your answer.
Ya gotta do something to improve your health.
If you set up the test to only view mortality and not disease as a result of the pill, you have your answer.
But, when you get alzheimers, you will not remember you took pills anyway, so it's all good.
“Yet statin use results in 20-30% lower all cause mortality.”
No they do not! Hell, EVERYONE would take them if they did! Seriously: People taking statins are already higher risk - or they would not be told to take them. If someone is at risk, and does nothing, then they will be at higher risk than someone who does something - and statins CAN impact that. Sometimes.
But I just reviewed several studies that claim to back up your statement, and they are garbage studies. For example, NONE OF THEM compared statins to simply changing one’s bad diet and starting exercise. I do agree: Someone who is eating crap and doesn’t exercise will often be better taking a statin than doing nothing at all.
But that does NOT make taking a statin the first or best option. And lowering LDL for the sake of lowering it - same with total cholesterol - is DUMB. LDL is bad cholesterol. Or good cholesterol. Depends on the LDL and why it is there!
Sweet spot for all cause mortality with total cholesterol is 190-260, not “below 200”. We NEED cholesterol and a healthy body eating a good diet WILL have LDL levels above 100. Our bodies create and manage cholesterol - but there is a huge difference between a body that is being abused by bad food and sitting around and a proper functioning body.
The solution is not trying to hide the abuse, but to remove it and allow the body to heal based on reality rather than Band-Aids!
No, it does not.
You really need to get a grip on reading pro-medical inflammatory - ahem - headlines and dive into the meat of the data.
If you don’t understand the results in the study below, then you have no business promoting such inflammatory statistics which weight your (erroneous) confirmation bias.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2812582
I am taking a statin and my cholesterol was normal. It has other very beneficial effects. Same for medicines for blood pressure and sugar. These numbers trend higher as you age and that’s considered normal. But not good. Take the medicine to lower intracranial blood pressure, take the load off your kidneys, and mitigate the damage from sugar.
Metformin was a 1000 year old natural cure before the gov regulated it.
Carbs weren’t a thing until cheap carbs, via subsidized corn, became pervasive.
Well the way the results you quoted are true, but quite misleading. Lets pretend 0.8% of people on statins have a bad outcome, and 1.0% of people not on statins have a bad outcome. It improved 20% (from 1 to 0.8, called relative risk reduction) but practically speaking the real risk reduction is 0.2% (absolute risk reduction), which is quite small. Similarly lets say you have a 5% chance of getting diabetes with statins vs 4% without. In this case the supporters of statins tend to quote the absolute difference of 1% rather than the relative risk of 20%. Here are some real numbers provided by perplexity
Composite Cardiovascular Outcomes
Relative risk reduction: 28% (RR 0.72)
Absolute risk reduction: 1.28%
NNT: 78
New-onset Diabetes
Relative risk increase: 4% overall, 25% for high-intensity statins
Absolute risk increase: 0.49% over 5 years
NNH: 204
So the proponents would quote a 28% benefit and a 0.49% chance of harm for statins, which is apples and oranges. The real benefit of statins is on the order of 1%. So overall, the benefit of statins for low risk people is very small in my opinion. This technique of swapping relative and absolute risk reductions is quite common in studies intended to sell a certain position.