For a long time, I went all-in on basic MAHA (make America healthy again) tenets, like avoiding statins that lower cholesterol. I rejected numerous recommendations from various physicians that I start in on a low-dose statin. I didn’t want to be part of a life-time sentence to take a drug with unknown long-term side effects, and inflating drug company profits. And besides, isn’t cholesterol supposed to be good for you, good for the brain?
Finally, about a half-dozen years ago I listened when a doctor put it to me straight that, as I aged, the odds were going up substantially that my elevated cholesterol would precipitate a heart attack or stroke.
Same with my elevated blood pressure. In fact, the two factors were combining to seriously weaken my circulatory system as I got older. He cited data to reinforce his points about how the risks of a stroke or heart attack decrease with use of the right prescription drugs.
When I had a checkup recently, the doctor congratulated me on my improved cholesterol and blood pressure readings. Because, he said, new studies were showing that modern statins and blood pressure meds not only reduced the risk of an “adverse event,” but actually improved longevity.
That last conclusion I had to look up. I couldn’t believe that Big Pharma drugs could actually improve health. The right foods and nutritional supplements might be able to improve health, but not Big Pharma pills.
So I used ChatGPT to search the scientific literature on that one. Here are a few of the recent studies and citations that got called up:
- A key British National Institute of Health Research trial found that people with high blood pressure who used standard blood‑pressure and statin therapy had fewer cardiovascular events for at least 16 years after starting treatment.
- In the West of Scotland Coronary Prevention Study (WOSCOPS), men took a statin or placebo for about 5 years; 20‑year follow‑up showed lower all‑cause mortality (about 13% relative reduction) and about a 21–27% reduction in coronary heart‑disease deaths in the statin group.
- HOPE‑3 (Health Outcomes Prevention Evaluation) from the National Institutes of Health enrolled over 12,000 adults worldwide at intermediate risk, with average blood pressure and cholesterol but at least one risk factor, and no prior cardiovascular disease.. Over 5.6 years, rosuvastatin 10 mg daily lowered LDL by about 25–30% and reduced heart attack, stroke, and cardiovascular death versus placebo; blood‑pressure drugs alone helped mainly in those who were clearly hypertensive.
Looking ahead, one issue that could make treatment decisions more difficult for individuals is that objective studies may well become less available because of political considerations. According to recent media reports, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is planning to apply political considerations to scientific study proposals. As the Financial Times put it in a recent article:” “Researchers have somehow come to be seen as enemies of the state. The OMB proposal takes aim at ‘woke ideology’ and ‘far-left activists’. Yes, peer review is not perfect but, as MIT professor Carlo Ratti recently wrote in the FT, political review is unarguably worse.”
My question regarding the studies that are being vetoed by OMB: If the research agenda is shifting, then will we see the results of the studies intended to discourage efforts to control cholesterol, and to prove the risks of vaccination? Here’s what CNN reported recently: “Early this year, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went to his director of the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, with a costly proposal, according to two officials familiar with the request: The research agency should spend $5 billion studying the link between vaccines and autism. That would have dedicated more than a tenth of the NIH’s annual budget to investigating a hypothesis already refuted by scientists worldwide…. His views are contradicted by scores of studies showing vaccines have saved millions of lives and prevented long-term health problems from common diseases, while side-effects remain relatively rare.”
I am testimony to the difficulty of letting go of certain preconceived ideas. The challenge I faced was how to make important health-related decisions—based on the views of well-intentioned ideologues or on scientific data? In the end, I have leaned heavily toward the data.
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