New study: Statin TV commercials have serious side effects (no joke!)

New study: Statin TV commercials have serious side effects (no joke!)


(NaturalNews) Watching television commercials funded by Big Pharma to
promote statin drugs could injure your health. Sound crazy? Read on.

A new study by Dr. Jeff Niederdeppe from Cornell University and colleagues concludes that TV ads appear to drive over-diagnosis of high cholesterol and over-treatment with statins. In
fact, if you go to your doctor and ask about statins you've seen
advertised on TV, the odds are great you'll walk out with a prescription
for the drugs - whether you really need it or not.

So
what's the danger? The class of cholesterol-lowering drugs known as
statins has been shown to have potentially serious side effects
including muscle pain, neurological disorders, rashes and liver
problems. And while the drugs have been proven to reduce LDL (the "bad"
cholesterol), the jury is still out on whether they actually play a role
in the primary prevention of coronary heart disease.

For their new study, which was just published online in the Journal of General Internal Medicine,
Niederdeppe and colleagues investigated whether exposure to
direct-to-consumer statin advertising was linked to high cholesterol
diagnosis and statin use among men and women at high, moderate, or low
risk for future cardiac events.

The research team looked at how
many times 106,685 American adults were potentially exposed to
commercials for statin drugs on national, cable and local television
between 2001-2007. They also collected data on whether these people
reported being diagnosed with high cholesterol and whether or not they
had taken a statin drug in the prior year. They compiled information on the study's participants' risk factors for coronary heart disease, too.

The
results suggest that those adults exposed to statin ads were 16 to 20
percent more likely to be diagnosed with high cholesterol, and 16 to 22
percent more likely to be using statins.
What's more, the chances of receiving both a diagnosis of high
cholesterol and increased statin use was driven almost exclusively by
men and women at low risk for future cardiac events.

"Our
findings raise questions about the extent to which direct-to-consumer
advertising may promote over-diagnosis and over-treatment for
populations where risks may outweigh potential benefits. In addition, we
found no evidence of favorable associations between exposure to statins
in television advertisements and statin use among those at high risk
for future cardiac events," the researchers concluded in their study.

Statins
are currently the most widely prescribed drugs in the U.S. although
numerous studies have found increasing downsides to these supposed
"magic bullets" for artery clogging cholesterol. As Natural News previously reported, for example, a study led by F.W. Fraunfelder, MD, of the Casey Eye Institute of Oregon Health and Science University,
was the first to systematically report on eye disorders - double vision
(diplopia), drooping of the upper eyelid (ptosis), and loss of full
range of motion of the eyes (ophthalmoplegia) - in people taking
statins. And scientists from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine
published a review paper of nearly 900 research studies on statins that
concluded statins may predispose many people to serious muscle and
kidney problems, potentially deadly heart arrhythmias and a host of
other health problems.

Source:-
http://www.naturalnews.com/039421_statin_drugs_TV_commercials_side_effects.html