Risk Assessment Report Suggests Fewer Americans Need to Take Statins
The American Heart Association developed updated guidelines with a new equation to calculate risks of cardiovascular disease in today’s population.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/new...PozVoFjPvQ51XOn
By Amie Dahnke
6/10/2024
Updated: 6/21/2024


About 40 percent of the people currently advised to take statins would not be if they were assessed using new criteria, according to a study published on June 10 in JAMA Internal Medicine.

In 2023, the American Heart Association developed a risk assessment to evaluate a person’s risk of heart disease. The assessment, PREVENT, significantly reduces the number of people who must take statins to prevent heart disease.

“We don’t want people to think they were treated incorrectly in the past. They were treated with the best data we had when the PCE (a cardiovascular risk calculator) was introduced back in 2013,” Dr. Timothy Anderson, lead author of the study, said in a statement. “The data have changed.”

Dr. Anderson noted that a person’s risk of developing atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease can change over time.

“For a patient who we now know is at lower risk than we previously thought, if we recommend they stop taking statins, they still could be back to a higher risk five years down the road, for the simple reason that everybody’s risk goes up as we get older,” he said.

The study compared the American Heart Association’s (AHA’s) 2023 guidelines with the 2013 American College of Cardiology guidelines. The AHA’s most recent guidelines, which use PREVENT, a new risk-assessing equation, found that fewer people may need to take statins, a cholesterol-lowering drug.

What Is PREVENT?

The PREVENT equation is a risk calculator created by the American Heart Association to predict people’s 10-year risk of atherosclerosis. While a tool already existed—the pooled cohort equation (PCE)—there were concerns that the PCE, which predicts risks based on sex- and race-specific factors, may overestimate cardiovascular risk because of underrepresentation in certain cohorts.

Related Stories
Statin Drugs Laid the Groundwork for COVID-19
5/13/2024
Statin Drugs Laid the Groundwork for COVID-19
3 Alternatives to Statins Might Target the Root of Heart Disease
3/12/2024


Unlike PCEs, PREVENT accounts for clinical factors, including cardiovascular and kidney issues, recognizing the link between cardiovascular, kidney, and metabolic health. Also, unlike PCE, PREVENT does not take race and ethnicity into consideration.

PREVENT was developed to determine risks within the current population more accurately, as the PCE was based on patient data from the 1940s to the 1980s.
The AHA developed the equation in November 2023 and offered it as a way to “be applied in a broad range of clinical and community settings,” noting in its journal that it can “be implemented by all clinicians who care for adult patients, including primary care, obstetrics and gynecology, cardiology, nephrology, and endocrinology settings.”
However, the authors wrote that they do not know if PREVENT’s risk score is more accurate than PCE’s in today’s practice.

Fewer Adults Need Statins

In the newest study comparing the 2013 PCE guidelines with the PREVENT equation, Dr. Anderson and his team found that the number of adults for whom statins are recommended could decrease to 28.3 million from 45.4 million and that roughly 4.1 million patients currently taking statins would no longer be advised to take them.

The researchers looked at data from 3,785 adults between the ages of 40 and 75 who were part of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) between January 2017 and March 2020.-- excerpt, rest at link above --

The Jig Is Up: Toxic Oreos lower LDL Cholesterol More Than Statins

Quote

---

I’m compiling research on the harms of statins. Place anything you’ve found valuable here in the comments.

— Tracy Beanz (@tracybeanz) January 23, 2024

---

So, what’s behind all the confusion on cholesterol? For starters, cholesterol is not the potent enemy of health and longevity it’s smeared to be. In fact, it is virtually impossible to explain how vital cholesterol is to the human body. In 2010, outlining the crucial role cholesterol plays in life, Dr. Zoë Harcombe, Ph.D., summarized its importance, explaining that every cell in the body is covered by a membrane (a protective barrier) consisting mainly of cholesterol, fat, and protein. Membranes are porous, not solid walls, letting nutrients and hormones in while keeping waste and toxins out. If cholesterol were removed from cell membranes, they would literally explode from their internal water pressure. Cholesterol is vital for hormone production, digestion, bones, and all the roles performed by vitamin D (together with sun exposure, cholesterol is required to produce vitamin D), the brain, the central nervous system, and memory functions.

Harcombe explained that one of the primary reasons humans spend nearly a third of their lives sleeping is to give the body time to produce cholesterol, repair cells, and perform other essential maintenance. But cholesterol’s significance to living goes even further. Most are familiar with the term “essential fatty acids” or “essential amino acids.” The term “essential” is used when speaking of nutrition in this way because it is essential to human health, yet the body cannot make it. Significantly, though, as pointed out by Harcombe, the body makes cholesterol. Remarking on that fact alone, she shared:

Quote

---

“That says to me that cholesterol is even more vital than essential fatty acids or essential amino acids—even though these too are life critical—and therefore the design of the human body is such that it was not left to chance that we needed to get cholesterol from food. Of the 500 or so roles that the liver has—one is to produce cholesterol. It is too vital to be left to chance.

The chemical formula for cholesterol is C27H46O. There is no good version or bad version. HDL and LDL are not even cholesterol, let alone good cholesterol or bad cholesterol. They are lipoproteins. They carry cholesterol, triglycerides, phospholipids, and protein. Do you think that taxis are people? Or do you think they are carriers of people (and luggage, pets, and other things)?”

Having cholesterol as this middleman has allowed an entire pharmaceutical industry (and stupid cookbooks) to come up with ways of lowering cholesterol. The most lucrative of these has clearly been statins–drugs designed to stop the body producing the cholesterol that it is designed to produce.”

---

Quote

---

Essential in nutrition means something we must consume – we don't make it.
There are essential fats & essential proteins. There are no essential carbohydrates.
There are essential vitamins & minerals.
Animal foods provide the essential nutrients & in the form that we need them.

— Dr Zoe Harcombe, PhD (@zoeharcombe) January 24, 2024

---

Harcombe’s remarks make perfect sense. Nonetheless, despite knowing cholesterol’s vital role in being alive, the belief that LDL cholesterol causes atherosclerosis, followed by coronary heart disease (CHD), is a fundamental principle of modern medicine—solely based on biased studies. Indeed, for the last forty years, the mainstream medical establishment has asserted that elevated serum cholesterol levels are a direct instigator of CHD and that statins are essential to controlling cholesterol levels. They make this declaration as if there were no other choices or healthier alternatives. Indeed, by using extensive promotional campaigns producing billions in profits, the medical industrial complex has convinced millions worldwide that the key to avoiding heart disease is reducing cholesterol levels by using statin drugs and eating a diet low in saturated fat—essentially stoking fear and nudging its trusting minions to avoid eating fats and meat and instead eat chemical-laden ultra-processed carbs. Hmmm… Post-COVID, with eyes wide open, a sinister Big Pharma strategy is illuminated. Proving the scheme, a 2005 publication in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons titled “LDL Cholesterol: “Bad” Cholesterol, or Bad Science,” noted:

Quote

---

“While the war on cholesterol has proved to be extremely lucrative for the food and drug industries, it has delivered no benefit to public health. CHD is still the leading cause of death in Western countries. If cholesterol reduction were effective in preventing CHD, then it would surely lower both fatal and nonfatal CHD. This has not happened. Modern medicine has made significant advances in extending the lives of those who have already had heart attacks, but it has failed to help people avoid CHD in the first place.

In addition, the relentless drive to steer people to low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets has been accompanied by a marked increase in the prevalence of obesity and diabetes. This increase has been so large that some predict the steady rise in life expectancy enjoyed by Americans during the last century may soon come to an end.”

---

Incredibly—despite record use of statin drugs—nearly two decades after noting that CHD was the number one cause of death in 2005, the deep-state peddler, the unscrupulous World Health Organization (WHO), reported in December 2020 that heart disease has remained the leading cause of death at the global level for the last twenty years. But that’s not all. The WHO added that heart disease is killing more people than ever before, with the number of deaths from heart disease increasing from 2 million since 2000 to nearly 9 million in 2019, representing 16 percent of total deaths from all causes. And with the heart issues tied to the deadly mRNA COVID-19 jabs, those figures are sure to increase.

-- excerpt, rest at link above --

Good information!