New Alternatives to Statins Add to a Quandary on Cholesterol - The New York Times - 0 views
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“We’ve reached a point where patients are increasingly facing five- and six-figure price tags for medications that they will take over the course of their lifetimes,” said Matthew Eyles, an executive vice president for America’s Health Insurance Plans, the national trade association for the insurance industry. “If this is the new normal to treat common and chronic conditions, how can any health system sustain that cost?”
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Doctors with patients who maintain they are intolerant to statins say they are confronted with a clash between the art and the science of medicine.
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Dr. Peter Libby, a doctor and researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said that in his role as a physician, “the patient is always right.” But, he added, “as a scientist, I find randomized, large-scale, double-blind studies more persuasive than anecdote.”
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The statin trials, which involved tens of thousands of people, found no more muscle aches, the most common complaint, in patients who took statins than in those who took placebos.
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The widely held belief that statins affect memory also has not been borne out in clinical trials, said Dr. Jane Armitage of the University of Oxford. She and her colleagues studied memory problems in 20,000 patients randomly assigned to take a statin or a placebo. “There was absolutely no difference,” she said.
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In a separate study, they looked at mood and sleep patterns and again found statins had no effect. Another study, in Scotland, detailed cognitive testing of older people taking statins or a placebo, and also found no effect.