Thu Apr 03 10:59:35 News and Political Hysterictomies: Some of you have heard news targeting a cholesterol drug Vytorin. I became interested in it because of the unusual coverage I saw of it on NBC news who did two days of coverage on their nightly news broadcast. From the news you get the impression that the drugs are ineffective and perhaps may even be dangerous. The news notes that:
1) Vytorin made billions of dollars of sales last year
2) Vytorin has no effect (they don’t really elaborate what effects were being tested)
3) It doesn’t appear ‘right now’ that the drug is dangerous
4) Ask your doctor.
Having read the study and asking my Pharmacology professor about it as well, I get a totally different impression. There are some things the anti-pharmaceutical news media aren’t telling people.
1) The patient population being tested were heterozygous (had one parent) who had a gene for Familial Hypercholesterolemia which makes up about 0.2% of the population in it's full homozygous form.
2) People who have two parents who had the gene, and who were unlucky enough to inherit the bad gene from both parents usually die young from heart attacks and have cholesterol buildup so bad that they start getting cholesterol blisters on their skin. These patients are extremely difficult to treat, and even heterozygotes have marked resistance to drug treatment.
3) Vytorin did in fact have some very beneficial effects in lowering fats in blood (triglycerides) by 6.6%, as well as inflammatory proteins associated with atherosclerosis (C-Reactive protein) by 25.7% EVEN in this high risk population (heterozygotes who make up about 1% of the population). The drug didn’t have the hoped-for effect of decreasing the size of Atherosclerotic plaques. (BTW, NO drugs have been shown to do this, i.e. reduce the size of plaques EVEN in the general population).
4) The alternatives to Ezetimibe (one component of Vytorin) are much more dangerous resin drugs that can interact with all kinds of other drugs (anti-clotting drugs, Contraceptives or HRT, antidepressants, etc).
I hope this helps clear up the confusion that this hullabaloo has cause people who are or need to take cholesterol drugs. Statins are very helpful for cholesterol, and ACE inhibitors are also extremely beneficial in hypertension. As always, people should ask their doctors about these treatments, but they should be wary of government bureaucrats who politicize research to further their careers or News Media outlets who jazz up stories for whatever reason.
