Eagle43 said:
So, flax seed or not, 200-225 seems to be my cholesterol level. Since we like garlic, olive oil, fish, salads, etc. and seldom eat red meat and since I exercise 7 days a week (almost without fail), I'd guess that without drug intervention, that it's in the genes. Lipitor hurts my liver. We'll see what the doc says. It would really urinate me off to have a heart attack after all this work. Of course, it's happened to other exercise enthusiasts (like Jim Fixx) before.
Your results look pretty good to me, as a non-expert. Before you worry too much, either have your doctor show you, or find on the web, the actual raw results of total mortality and HD mortality in the most successful Lipitor vs. nada trial. The way it is usually expressed sounds very meaningful, "Lipitor reduced heart attacks by 27%” or whatever. However, (I don't have the true numbers, I am just illustrating) if out of 1000 men, 10 died with placebo, and 5 died with Lipitor, that is reported as a 50% mortality improvement. But it seems to me more relevant to note that in the treated group 995 are still alive, and in the nada group 990 are still alive. 99.5% vs. 99%.
And this is the absolute best case. Even cholesterol lowering advocates have to admit that once a man is over 60 or so, cholesterol either makes no difference, or high cholesterol is associated with longevity. And it women, it hardly seems to matter at any age.
These are great drugs from the POV of the drug company. Usually drugs taken for one's lifetime are for pretty sick people, whose lifetimes are maybe short, and who are a relatively small % of the population. Anti-hypertensives are a contra-example, but the patients are clinically sick, even if sometimes only mildly so. Off the top of my head, birth control pills are the only popular example of a drug intended to be taken for a long time by healthy people, prior to the advent of statins.
Given this extreme profitability, I at least would expect some high quality spinning coming from the drug companies, their researchers, and their clinical trial docs in academia. These people bend over backward to magnify positive results, and explain away as anomalies negative results- such as one trial where 7 or 8 women in the treated group got breast cancer, and only one in the placebo group did.
And let us not forget that our friendly Family Doc has a horse in this race too. I have a dermatologist friend who used to brag that Derm is the only specialty where people never get better, and rarely die or get much worse. Treating cholesterol, as opposed to heart disease, brings a lot of Docs formerly denied this cushy station in out of the cold.
H