The statin saga – do they help or harm? – took a fascinating new turn on Sunday when statin supremo Professor Sir Rory Collins confessed to the Express that he hadn’t actually done the analysis needed to uncover the true side-effect rate.

If you’ve been following this pharmacological soap, your response when you heard this was probably first amazed laughter, followed by outrage at the breath-taking hypocrisy and then, after a brief reflection, alarm at the implications.

Liraglutide hit the headlines in January because it had just been approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) for the treatment of obesity, to be marketed as “Saxenda”. The EMA had previously approved it for type 2 diabetes in July 2009. In America the approval for obesity had come a month earlier in December 2014.

Here are some heretical thoughts about the war against cancer.
“It’s unwinnable. We not going to cure it and we don’t need to.”
“Everyone thinks being diagnosed with cancer is a calamity. It’s not necessarily the case. We can transform cancer from a dreaded killer to something we can live with.”

Professor Mina Bissell presents a fascinating challenge to the cancer establishment. She is a highly respected academic and leading authority on breast cancer at the University of California, where she is Distinguished Scientist with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Life Sciences Division next to UCB campus.

Over the past year I have been wondering whether there is something deeply flawed about research into the effects of high fat diets on rats and mice, done presumably to clarify the effects on humans. The rodent work consistently tells us that high fat diets make you fat and diabetic, while research on humans finds they do the opposite. What is going on?

Last month two new cholesterol lowering drugs stepped into the limelight at AHA’s (American Heart Association) annual conference. Neither is likely to make it to market until the end of next year but soon after that they are likely to be coming to a doctor’s surgery near you.

A new, as yet unpublished, study shows that the elderly are very likely to seriously lack vitamin D, raising their risk of broken bones. What’s more care homes rarely offer supplements. Making the situation even worse are the cocktails of prescription drugs that many of these patients swallow daily.

A few years ago Dr David Unwin stumbled upon the website for patients with diabetes, fairly easily confused with the official diabetes charity site. It was a revelation. “It had over 100,000 members and one of the most popular topics was the low carb high fat diet,” he says.

The obvious problem with the recent government announcement that doctors will be paid for diagnosing people with dementia, is that there is no approved form of treatment. This is because research funding has all concentrated on finding a drug that will slow the disease down or even stop it in its tracks.

Regular readers of the “Statin Wars” soap that we’ve been following here for several months will be eager to know the result of the survey sent to members of the British Cardiovascular Society (BCS) last month. (Read More…)