The recent guest post by David Newman has prompted several thought-provoking comments. Since most readers will likely miss the comments, I’ve moved these comments to a separate post. Statin Island May 27, 2012, 3:35 PM: Thank you. Clearly, this important commentary raises questions about the integrity of Lancet as well as the authors of the study. But…
You Know Nothing, Dr. Snow: Why Medicine Can’t Be More Like Facebook
May 18, 2012 by 3 Comments
Medicine can never be like Facebook, despite what Matt Herper argues over at Forbes. Perhaps he was just trolling for hits on a day when everyone is thinking about the Facebook IPO, but Herper proposed, with apparently seriousness, that medicine needs to model itself on the tech world in order to match the kind of…
Large Metaanalysis Finds Statins Effective in Low Risk Patients
May 16, 2012 by Leave a Comment
A very large metaanalysis provides strong evidence that the relative reduction in risk of statins is at least as great in low-risk patients as in high-risk patients. The finding, write the authors, provides evidence that expansion of guidelines to lower risk populations should be considered. In their paper in the Lancet, the the Cholesterol Treatment Trialists’ (CTT)…
Preoperative Statins Found to Reduce AF and Length of Stay But Not Mortality
April 18, 2012 by Leave a Comment
In a systematic review published in the Cochrane Library investigators at the University of Cologne in Germany analyzed data from 11 trials that tested the effects of preoperative statins in 984 patients undergoing heart surgery. Preoperative administration of statins reduced the risk of developing atrial fibrillation (AF) and shortened the length of stay on the ICU and in the…
Guest Post: Another Round in the Debate on Diabetes and Statins
March 6, 2012 by 4 Comments
Another Round in the Debate on Diabetes and Statins by Roger Blumenthal Let me start by saying that I am proud to have Eric Topol as a friend and a trusted advisor over the past 20 years. His work has been an inspiration to cardiovascular health professionals for several decades. His new book, The Creative Destruction…
Eric Topol, Megamind
March 5, 2012 by 2 Comments
Ralph Waldo Emerson famously wrote that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” If this is true then Eric Topol, who earlier today wrote a New York Times editorial highly critical of statins, is Megamind. Here’s what he wrote in a 2004 editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine: Even today, only a…
Statins and Diabetes: Real Concern or Much Ado About Nothing?
March 5, 2012 by 6 Comments
Updated at 7 PM with a detailed comment at the bottom from C. Michael Minder of Johns Hopkins– In a New York Times Op-Ed piece on Monday, Eric Topol comments on last week’s announcement by the FDA that it was changing the label for statins. Topol focuses on the new warning that statins raise the risk…
FDA Revises the Safety Labeling of Statins
February 28, 2012 by 2 Comments
The FDA today announced important new changes to the safety language on the labels of statins: Routine periodic monitoring of liver enzymes is no longer recommended. Serious liver injury associated with statins is “rare and unpredictable in individual patients” and “routine periodic monitoring of liver enzymes does not appear to be effective in detecting or…
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