Before you get your statins, make positive you"ve looked at the stats

The other disclosure that is essential – far more critical, I’d say, in terms of potential bias – is that each and every day for the final two many years I’ve taken 40mg of simvastatin (not created by my employer). I bullied my GP into prescribing it to me. “Your cholesterol’s a bit large, but it’s not beyond the upper limit of typical,” he told me.

But my family members has a historical past of cardiovascular condition. Males in each maternal and paternal line have died, far as well youthful by present day requirements, from heart attacks and strokes. My father died just 15 years older than I am now. I’m wholesome, but I want to continue to be so, for more than 15 years. Give me a prophylactic statin now! (And my lovely GP did.)

In other phrases, I’m precisely the sort of patient in excess of whom the “statin wars” are becoming fought. On one particular side are those who worry we are over-prescribing a drug that, like all medicines, carries a chance of side-results. On the other are people like Professor Rory Collins, Oxford’s professor of medicine, who believes that thousands of lives could be saved had been statins far more extensively prescribed. Prof Collins raised the alarm about the BMJ papers, telling 1 newspaper that potential overall health impacts, must a higher-risk patient desist their medicine, were “a severe disservice to British and worldwide medicine”.

Following Italy, I joined the pharmaceutical sector. Alone no a lot more! The shock to my technique from the amount of independent evaluations of my perform, of the fundamental checking of my calculations, was prolonged-lasting. Not since then have I published a data-primarily based viewpoint about a single of our company’s medicines with no it currently being very first scrutinised, challenged, confirmed.

Prior to a statistical evaluation from my staff finds its way into a clinical trial report or publication, it is topic to a several-level good quality handle method. Prior to any of our medicines is licensed for sale, all of the data about its efficacy and safety is checked by government companies.

I’m not complaining: we promote medicines. The far more scrutiny the much better. It’s just, possessing read through that BMJ editorial, I wonder whether published academic study may not advantage itself from a lot more rigour and checking. The statins paper isn’t the very first publication that has triggered a scare, soon after all.

The BMJ is to be applauded for taking the criticisms critically and announcing an independent inquiry. I hope that the panel will consist of statisticians. Plural. Genuine ones who know what they are talking about, which seems to me to be of a lot better significance than the identify or sector of their employer.

Doug Altman, a fantastic health care (academic) statistician, after said that it remained “widely acceptable for a healthcare researcher to be ignorant of statistics”. The researcher, perhaps. Their scientific journals: no.

Before you get your statins, make positive you"ve looked at the stats