In yet another damaging development for the pharma industry’s multi-billion-dollar statins business, a large study has revealed that, in more than 51 percent of patients, the drugs are not effective at lowering blood cholesterol levels. Published in the journal Heart, the study found that even after 2 years on statins, the majority of patients achieve a ‘suboptimal’ response. With the cholesterol theory of heart disease already now essentially ‘dead’, and statins proven to be linked to a wide range of adverse side effects, the study further discredits the use of these drugs in the prevention and control of cardiovascular diseases.
The study examined data on a total of 165,411 patients, for whom the average monitoring period was 6 years. At the time of beginning treatment with statins, the patients’ average age was 62. Revealingly, in 84,609 people, the drugs failed to achieve the supposedly ‘optimal’ goal of reducing cholesterol levels by 40 percent.
Moreover, providing clear evidence of the ineffectiveness of statin drugs in preventing cardiovascular disease, a total of 22,798 patients went on to develop it. For 10,656 of them, this was despite having achieved a supposedly ‘healthy’ cholesterol reduction of 40 percent.
In an attempt to explain the study’s results, the researchers claim their findings could be due to either the genetic makeup of the patients, the statins not being taken as prescribed, or the doses being too low. Meanwhile, the clear failure of the drugs to lower cholesterol levels in most patients was dismissed as merely highlighting “the need for personalized medicine in lipid management”. Translated into plain English, this means giving different drugs to different people, higher doses, or both.
Statins fail to effectively prevent cardiovascular disease for the simple reason that high cholesterol isn’t its root cause. In this respect, we need to be aware of the three key facts about cholesterol that have essentially been withheld from us by the pharmaceutical industry and its various stakeholders in the media, politics, and medicine.
Firstly, cholesterol is not our enemy. It is a molecule that is essential for life, a structural constituent of the walls of billions of cells in the body, and the precursor of many biological molecules, including hormones such as estrogen and testosterone. Secondly, if the blood vessel walls are structurally intact there is no scientific evidence that cholesterol, even in moderately elevated concentrations, damages them or causes atherosclerotic plaques and heart attacks. Thirdly, in animal studies, for cholesterol to have a damaging effect on otherwise intact blood vessel walls (i.e. for it to cause plaques), it has to be artificially increased to levels essentially never observed in humans.
In short, therefore, contrary to the claims of conventional medicine, there is no credible scientific evidence that cholesterol – even at moderately elevated levels – can damage an otherwise intact blood vessel wall.
As Dr. Rath describes in his groundbreaking book, ‘Why Animals Don’t Get Heart Attacks…But People Do!’, the primary cause of cardiovascular disease is a chronic deficiency of vitamin C in the cells of the artery walls. A lack of vitamin C weakens the artery walls through the body not being able to produce enough collagen, a fibrous protein that is the main component in connective tissue. Vitamin C is essential for the production of this important protein.
In the absence of sufficient collagen, substances such as cholesterol, lipoproteins, and other risk factors enter the weakened walls in an attempt to repair the damage and strengthen the arteries. Unless the body is resupplied with optimal amounts of vitamin C, the artery wall repair process becomes continuous and atherosclerotic deposits develop. The narrowed arteries that result from this will eventually then lead to heart attacks and strokes.
Given the accumulated scientific proof that high cholesterol isn’t the root cause of cardiovascular disease, promoting and prescribing statin drugs is increasingly akin to defending the idea that the Earth is flat. This irrationality was clearly visible upon the release of the Heart journal study, when the pharmaceutical industry’s stakeholders were immediately out in force in the media. Describing statins as ‘proven’ they advised patients to continue taking them daily. So far as the credibility of the pharmaceutical ‘business with disease’ is concerned, the cynical sales-driven nature of this PR response speaks volumes.
The ‘revelation’ that, for most people, statins don’t even do what we are told they are supposed to do, namely, lower cholesterol to ‘optimal’ levels, amounts to yet another nail in the coffin of cholesterol-lowering drugs. Try as the drug industry might, breathing further life into the idea that cholesterol causes cardiovascular disease is no longer either possible or credible. Whether pharma companies like it or not, patients are increasingly deciding for themselves what is best for their health and that of their families. Short of the practice of medicine becoming an outright dictatorship, the end of the cardiovascular disease epidemic is now only a matter of time.