Don’t prescribe statins to any more people. That’s the clear message from a strongly worded open letter to the head of NICE and to the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt published today. If you groan at the prospect of yet more confusion over statins, this post might bring a bit of clarity. Please read on.

It’s the latest volley in long running battle about whether cholesterol lowering statins are a good way of cutting the risk of heart attack and death in virtually the entire population with vanishingly small number of effects or whether they don’t actually benefit most people and are quite likely to cause side effects that range from the unpleasant to the deadly.(Read more…)

Last week I was called by a friend who opened the conversation by saying: “So you were wrong about statins.” He was referring to the correction that the British Medical Journal (BMJ) has had to make in two papers that claimed statins have a high level of side effects. But I certainly haven’t recanted and started popping those pills.
Given the huge amount of attention this has attracted, the actual point being “corrected” is remarkably small. It is the kind of thing that would normally be dealt with by publishing a response to the article in the journal. I’ll come to the specifics in a moment but first a bit of context…. (Read more…)

Have you had one of those nasty moments recently when it is clear that your memory is failing? Confidently rushing up stairs to get something then realising you have no idea what it was; meeting someone you know perfectly well and being unable to remember their name. A few of these moments and a name that none of us forgets comes all too easily to mind: Alzheimer’s…. (Read more…)

There is a whiff of the Wizard of Oz about the advice on statins that we’ve been getting for years. It comes in the form of ringing pronouncements from behind a curtain that all is well… (Read more…)

What’s the best way to eat if you want to stay a healthy weight and lower your risk of various chronic disorders? That’s the big question behind the long running diet war between an embattled low fat establishment and those in my gang – the low carb/high fat rebels. (Read more…)

Should a professional body, however eminent, be allowed to keep information about the safety of products they are supplying to public hidden so no one else can run tests on them? (Read more…)

HealthInsightUK has a number of contributors who are experts in statins. Here three of them – Dr John Briffa, Zoë Harcombe and Aidan Goggins respond to the CTT investigation. They explain why side-effect data is unreliable and disagree about whether it is in the drug companies interest that the risk of side-effects is downplayed or is that part of cunning plan? (Read more…)

Like returning soldiers cancer survivors are usually given some sort of victory celebration. But as with soldiers for far too many that is just the beginning of a new and much more lonely set of personal battles. About a quarter of cancer survivors – 500.000 people in the UK – are dealing with the long term fall out from their treatment. (Read more…)

Increasingly people are questioning whether it’s worth taking statins, the cholesterol-lowering drugs that are supposed to cut your risk of developing heart disease. We think they are a really bad idea, unless you’ve already got heart disease, and have explained why… (Read more…)

Last week an email containing what looked like a great story arrived in my inbox – drug kills 800,000 in Europe in 5 years! A quick check revealed that that this was no wild or dodgy claim. It was based on research by a cardiologist at Imperial College Professor Darryl Francis, just published in the European Heart Journal.(Read more…)