Monday, January 15, 2007

DRUG-COMPANY HATRED AT WORK?

Or a medical profession that does not like to admit that it has been wrong?

There is some very confused thinking in the article excerpted below. If you read the report carefully, all that the latest research shows is that "bad" cholesterol may not be so bad after all. People deficient in it seem to be at more risk of Parkinson's. So maybe we NEED that "bad" cholesterol. Pesky!! The mention of "dangerous" drugs called statins is a red herring -- presumably motivated by hatred of drug companies -- and the idea that they are a risk is actually CONTRADICTED by the research findings:
"Research suggesting a possible link between the statin heart drugs being taken by millions of people and Parkinson's disease has prompted scientists to launch an investigation involving tens of thousands of patients. Researchers in the United States have been sufficiently alarmed by the preliminary findings of a small study of 124 patients to plan a full trial with 16,000 participants to examine whether the world's best-selling drugs can heighten the risk of developing the condition....

A study at the University of North Carolina, however, has shown that patients with low levels of LDL cholesterol are more than three and a half times as likely to develop the disease as those with higher LDL levels...

Patricia Limousin, consultant neurologist at the Institute of Neurology in London, said: "There is absolutely no evidence that statin drugs cause Parkinson's disease. In fact these drugs were related to a lower occurrence of Parkinson's disease in Huang's study, raising the possibility of a protective effect that warrants further investigations."

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