Rien de très nouveau sous le soleil.

La thrombolyse cérébrale est maintenant presque "standard of care" quand les
conditions sont toute remplies,mais les études sur lesquelles ladite
pratique se base sont...sont...enfin,ne sont apparemment ni légion,ni si
concluantes.Qu'a-t-on balayé sous le tapis,que retenir de tout cela? A
chaque fois que je lis ou que j'entends parler des études ayant mené à cette
large(?)acceptation de la thrombolyse cérébrale,je suis un peu plus
confuse,un peu plus indécise,et bien contente de n'avoir pas eu,à ce jour,à
prendre ce genre de décision.La plupart des patients arrivent
heureusement(!!!)trop tard pour l'envisager,et aucun neuroradiologue n'est
disponible dans le CH où je travaille.

Le cas rapporté dans l'article que tu cites est un "case report".On ne peut
rien en conclure "per se".(Je me rappelle la première patiente chez qui j'ai
vu administrer la streptokinase...dame de 45 ans qui est décédée d'une
hémorragie cérébrale.Ayoye.

Mais dans le domaine de la thrombolyse cérébrale,je suis incapable de me
faire une opinion:en fait,c'est faux.Mon opinion est que l'engouement pour
ce traitement repose sur des bases...fragiles.Mais bon.Je ne suis pas
neurologue,je ne connais que la pointe de l'iceberg et les revues de
littérature que d'autres gens me présentent en congrès.Je ne peux
donc,vraiment,avoir une opinion.

C.

-----Message d'origine-----
De : Stephan Gascon [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Envoyé : 24 juin 2008 14:36
À : [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Objet : URG-L: Les médicaments miracles qui peuvent tuer!

Courriel paru sur une autre liste. 

Bonne lecture.

Stéphan Gascon


Wonder Drugs That Can Kill


06.20.2008 


Modern pharmaceutical "breakthroughs" sometimes do more harm than good. 


by Jeanne Lenzer 

 

Phil Brewer thought he knew exactly what to do when the ambulance crew
wheeled a well-dressed man in his late sixties into the emergency
department. What he didn't know: He was about to be involved in a series of
events that would kill his patient. Brewer, then an assistant professor of
emergency medicine at Yale School of Medicine, had been alerted by the crew
that the man, Sanders Tenant (a pseudonym), had suddenly begun to talk
gibberish while dining out with his family. Then his right arm and leg had
gone weak.

 

Brewer suspected an acute stroke, but first he had to rule out conditions
that can masquerade as a stroke
<http://www.springerlink.com/content/g030123207rr3w22/> , such as low blood
sugar, a seizure, a brain tumor, and migraine headache. He had only minutes
to make the correct diagnosis. Then the gathering medical team would decide
whether to use a new stroke treatment that had recently been approved, a
clot-buster known as tPA. Brewer called in a neurologist and the stroke
team. After a CAT scan of the patient's brain showed no sign of bleeding
(something that would prevent the use of a clot-buster), the decision was
made: Yes, use tPA. Despite following each step of the established protocol
for this new treatment, Brewer experienced the unthinkable—his patient's
death. Tenant suffered a massive brain hemorrhage and died, not from his
stroke but from effects of tPA, the drug that was meant to save him.

 

When we go to the doctor, we assume that the drugs he or she prescribes have
been carefully tested to make sure they are both safe and effective. Most
times they are. Yet sometimes the drugs cause more problems than they solve.
Adverse drug reactions kill tens of thousands of people annually; one widely
cited study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association
(JAMA) in 1998 puts the number at more than 100,000
<http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/279/15/1200> . Recently a
series of drug recalls have pulled back the curtain to show how the media,
the public, and some doctors can misinterpret medical studies or take them
out of context in ways that make medical treatments look safer and more
effective than they actually are.

 

To a greater degree than ever before, powerful forces in the marketplace are
impacting the quality, use, and safety of prescription medications. Drug
manufacturers are spending more to promote their products while being
subjected to tighter regulation and greater pressure for financial returns.
The media are talking up each new "miracle cure" in headlines and television
segments. Doctors have to navigate a tangle of administrative and medical
concerns, one physician noting that "if you have a patient in your office,
you can't say, 'Oh, I'm going to look at the drug company's online database
about Zyprexa <http://www.drugs.com/zyprexa.html> .' Most doctors don't even
know the databases exist. But even if they did, the next thing you know,
three or four hours have gone by and you've missed all the patients waiting
to see you." Insurance companies and even the stock market play a role too.
And consumers, increasingly subject to pharmaceutical advertising
<http://www.prwatch.org/node/7026> , are routinely urged to demand the best
and the newest for their health. All together, this is a perfect storm for
prescription drug problems.

 

How often do today's medical "breakthroughs" become tomorrow's discredited
science? John P. A. Ioannidis <http://users.uoi.gr/hyepilab/people.php> , an
epidemiologist at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston and the
University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece, studied the question.
He examined the most-cited clinical studies published in the top three
medical journals between 1990 and 2000 to see how well researchers' initial
claims held up against subsequent research. His findings, published in JAMA,
show that the key claims of nearly one-third (14 out of 49) of the original
research studies he examined were either false or exaggerated. Small study
size, design flaws, publication bias (failure to publish negative results or
duplication of positive results), drug-industry influence, and the play of
chance were among the problems Ioannidis found that caused false or
exaggerated claims.

 

Studies can be designed and interpreted in ways that make even ineffective
drugs seem like lifesavers, says Curt Furberg, a well-known cardiovascular
epidemiologist and former chief of the clinical trials branch at the
National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. Furberg, a
tall, square-faced man with a Swedish accent, wants more objectivity in
medical research. "We need more publicly funded studies
<http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371
/journal.pmed.0010060> ," he says, adding that manufacturer-sponsored
research tends to minimize risks and exaggerate benefits.

 

A score of studies support his opinion. Among them is a 2003 analysis by
Cary P. Gross
<http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/289/4/454?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits
=10&RESULTFORMAT=1&author1=Gross&andorexacttitle=and&andorexacttitleabs=and&
andorexactfulltext=and&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=10&sortspec=relevance&fdate=1/1
/2000&resourcetyp%20> , an associate professor of medicine at Yale School of
Medicine, that was published in JAMA. In his survey, one study found that
industry-sponsored research was positive 87 percent of the time compared
with 65 percent positive for research that was not industry sponsored.
According to Gross, the evidence was overwhelming that "industry sponsorship
was likely to yield pro-industry results." A 2006 analysis published in the
American Journal of Psychiatry found that 90 percent of
manufacturer-sponsored studies of antipsychotic drugs led to claims that the
study drug was as good as, or superior to, every other drug in its class.
Shannon Brownlee, an award-winning medical writer based in Washington, D.C.,
ascribed this to the "Lake Wobegon effect
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon_effect> ," which renders every
drug "above average."

 

Furberg's efforts to debunk overly enthusiastic interpretations of medical
studies have led to occasional clashes with his colleagues. In 2004 the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was preparing to hold hearings on the
safety of painkillers known as COX-2 inhibitors, including Vioxx, which
David Graham, an official in the FDA's Office of Drug Safety, said may have
caused an estimated 39,000 to 60,000 heart-attack deaths in just five years.
At the time, Furberg was a member of the FDA Advisory Committee on Drug
Safety and Risk Management. But after he told The New York Times that the
COX-2 inhibitor Bextra also caused heart attacks, the agency made a
surprising move: It removed Furberg
<http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C01E0D7133FF93BA25752C1A962
9C8B63&sec=health>  from the advisory panel. Sandra Kweder, acting director
of the Office of New Drugs, Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the
FDA, told a reporter that Furberg's comments showed he could not be
objective. Furberg now asks, "If bias was a concern, why did they allow 10
advisory members with ties to the manufacturers to be seated?" He was
reinstated to the panel two days later and vindicated when the FDA announced
that it had asked Pfizer to voluntarily withdraw Bextra from the market.

 

+++

 

Part of the difficulty in detecting drug side effects, Furberg says, has to
do with study size. Drugs go through a regimen of tests
<http://www.marrow.org/PATIENT/Undrstnd_Disease_Treat/Undrstnd_Treat_Opt/Lrn
_Clinical_Trials/What_is_a_Clinical_Trial/index.html>  prior to receiving
approval from the FDA. During the first two stages, called Phase I and II
trials, an experimental drug is tested on just a few hundred volunteers to
look for side effects. If no serious problems are detected, the drug is
tested for efficacy in a Phase III trial. But efficacy trials often involve
only several hundred to a few thousand patients. And while a study of 200 to
300 arthritis patients is large enough to show whether a new drug relieves
pain, just one such study isn't large enough to pick up less-common—but
potentially deadly—side effects. Furberg says, "If only one in a thousand
patients will die from a heart attack, an efficacy study of 200 or even
2,000 patients is simply too small to get a reliable answer about rare side
effects." Seemingly rare side effects can take tens of thousands of lives
when millions of prescriptions are written.

How do today's medical "breakthroughs" become tomorrow's discredited science

Such limitations in a study's design can escape detection even by top peer
reviewers and medical editors. Marcia Angell, the former editor-in-chief of
The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), says that most doctors are ill
equipped to critically assess the conclusions of researchers. A trim woman
with a warm smile, Angell leans forward in her seat at her home in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and says, "Let me tell you the dirty secret of
medical journals: It is very hard to find enough articles to publish. With a
rejection rate of 90 percent for original research, we were hard pressed to
find 10 percent that were worth publishing. So you end up publishing weak
studies because there is so much bad work out there." Doctors, Angell says,
are not skeptical enough about what they read in top journals. "They should
say, 'I don't believe this; prove it to me.'"

 

The rest of the media don't get any better marks. Gary Schwitzer
<http://www.sjmc.umn.edu/aboutus/fac_gschwitzer.html> , director of graduate
studies in health journalism at the University of Minnesota School of
Journalism, examined 400 medical news stories that were carried by 57 of the
top print and broadcast media. "The majority failed to adequately discuss
costs, quantify harms and benefits, and examine the quality of the studies,"
Schwitzer says. Many quoted a sole source and failed to report potential
financial conflicts. Schwitzer concluded that media reports give "a
kid-in-the-candy-store portrayal, where everything is made to look amazing,
harmless, and without a price tag." Patients themselves "should not escape
notice as willing collaborators, wishing for magic potions and taking drug
company money to support consumer organizations," Schwitzer continues.

 

Phil Brewer, the doctor whose stroke patient died after being treated with
tPA, says media portrayals of new medicines are often "irrationally
exuberant." He points to a May 2007 article
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/28/health/28stroke.html?scp=1&sq=Lifesaving+
Opportunities+Missed%2C+Before+and+After+Stroke&st=nyt>  in The New York
Times that he says typifies the problem. The article, about stroke victims,
said that the clot-buster "tPA was shown in 1996 to save lives." Yet in
2001, the American Heart Association (AHA) had withdrawn the claim that the
drug "saves lives" from its promotion of tPA for stroke after the group was
challenged to provide scientific evidence to support that claim. The AHA was
also the subject of scrutiny when it was revealed that in the decade prior
to its recommendation that doctors use tPA for stroke victims, the heart
association had received $11 million from Genentech, tPA's manufacturer.

 

The same Times article quoted a number of doctors saying that too few stroke
patients were receiving tPA, yet failed to mention that many of these same
doctors had received funding from Genentech
<http://www.gene.com/gene/index.jsp?q=genentech&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=o
rg.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a> . Nor did the article give a
hint of the ferocious battle among doctors about the safety and efficacy of
tPA: While a number of professional associations endorsed the drug, many
others, such as the American Academy of Emergency Medicine, said it should
not be considered the standard of care for acute stroke.

 

Asked about this reporting, Barbara Strauch, health editor of The Times,
responded, "While some researchers had said in interviews that they believed
the drug saved lives, our article incorrectly stated that the study had made
that conclusion." Strauch said the paper would publish a correction—which it
did this past April, nearly a year later. (This was done in response to
DISCOVER's inquiries.) She added, "It is also true that some researchers
quoted in the article, like many stroke researchers and many who study other
diseases, are funded by and receive honoraria from the pharmaceutical
industry. However, the main sources for our article were researchers at the
National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke
<http://www.ninds.nih.gov/>  (NINDS), who, the National Institutes of Health
says, do not take money from drug manufacturers."

 

"What you read in the media are these stories of a stroke patient getting
tPA and miraculously improving within minutes," Brewer says. "But we've all
seen that happen in the ER, even before tPA was ever invented." After his
patient died, Brewer, wary of drawing conclusions on the basis of a single
case, wanted to make sense of the data about tPA. Even though a landmark
1995 study conducted by NINDS showed that 12 to 13 of every 100 treated
patients had less disability, Brewer says that "it was hard to put the
conflicting [study] results together and determine whether the benefits
really did outweigh the risks." So, like many physicians, he turned to the
articles and analyses of Jerome Hoffman, a professor of medicine and
emergency medicine at UCLA. "Dr. Hoffman has a brilliant mind," Brewer says.
"He is listened to and trusted by more emergency physicians than anyone I
know." An authority on medical studies, Hoffman, it turns out, was also the
lone dissenting member of the AHA panel that recommended tPA for stroke.

 

+++

 

Tall, white-haired, and wearing thick glasses, Hoffman
<http://www.uclahealth.org/body.cfm?id=458&action=detail&ref=6282>  looks
the part of an elder statesman of medicine. He says he became interested in
the interpretation of medical literature when he was just starting out as a
resident physician at UCLA. He read studies and their interpretations
voraciously, and eventually other physicians began coming to his talks to
residents and medical students on how to interpret the medical literature.
"Some studies just didn't make sense to me," he says. "I was reading all
these things that came to opposite conclusions. They couldn't all be right."
Besides, Hoffman says, "there were studies that didn't represent what I was
seeing in clinical practice."

 

When the NINDS study was published in December 1995, Hoffman paid attention.
"It was a big deal," he says. "If tPA
<http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=4751> worked, it
would be a real advance over what we could offer patients during an acute
stroke." But, he says, "you [should] never believe one study—especially of a
drug that has only a small benefit, and especially a study that is
contradicted by other studies, as was the case here." Hoffman is also
critical of a study that Genentech says supports the NINDS trial findings.
He contends that this study, known as SITS-MOST
<http://www.strokecenter.org/trials/TrialDetail.aspx?tid=296> , shows "how
study design and spin can inflate perceived benefit." This is because "no
patient with a severe stroke was allowed into SITS-MOST—by design—so the
patients who did get included were virtually certain to do well as a group,
no matter what treatment they did or didn't get. Comparing them to the much
sicker patients in the big trials isn't like comparing apples with
oranges—it's comparing apples with elephants."

One way to make drugs look better or safer is to report only successful
studies while ignoring those with bad results.

Hoffman says that the truth in any drug study can be camouflaged by how it
is reported. "One way that's been done—for many treatments, and not just
[clot-busters]—is to use combination end points." Here's how it works: A
single drug can be tested for a variety of outcomes; for example, a
cholesterol-lowering drug <http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/statins/CL00010>
can be tested for its effect on cholesterol level, blood pressure, and/or
rates of heart failure, heart attack, or death. By combining two or more of
these outcomes to create a single category, you can say it helped "A and B"
even if it only helped A and not B. For example, although there was no
statistically significant effect from tPA in the NINDS trial on the number
of patients who died, there was a small decrease in disability for those who
survived. With the two factors combined, there was technically a decrease in
the combination end point of "death and disability." >From there, it's a
short step to the incorrect assumption that death and disability were each
decreased—an assumption made by many physicians and patients.

 

David L. Brown, chief of the division of cardiovascular medicine
<http://www.hsc.stonybrook.edu/som/internalmed/cardiology/index.html>  at
the State University of New York, Stony Brook School of Medicine, calls the
use of combination end points a "brilliant marketing tool." Brown says that
while combination end points have a legitimate purpose when researchers are
testing drugs for a rare or infrequent outcome, far too often researchers
use the information in ways that "mislead both doctors and the general
public."

 

Another way to make drugs look better and safer than they are is to report
or cite only successful studies while ignoring those with bad outcomes. The
problem of cherry-picking studies is a very real one, especially for
antidepressants
<http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jul/health-trends-alternatives-for-people-
who-are-anti-antidepressants> , says Erick Turner, a former FDA reviewer,
now an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Oregon Health & Science
University. Turner recently published research in NEJM showing that "when
studies of antidepressants were negative, they were reported as negative
only 8 percent of the time—but when studies were positive, they were
reported as positive 97 percent of the time."

 

Genentech acknowledges that no controlled study has ever shown—or been
conducted to show—that tPA "saves lives" in cases of acute stroke. What the
NINDS study showed, Genentech spokesperson Krysta Pellegrino says, is that
"patients were at least 30 percent more likely to have a decrease in
stroke-related disability three months after treatment compared with
placebo." Although Genentech admits that high-risk patients were excluded
from analysis in SITS-MOST, Pellegrino says the company believes the data
from that study "add to the body of evidence that supports the conclusion
that tPA is safe and effective for the treatment of acute stroke."

 

+++

"Dying with corrected cholesterol is not a successful outcome," John
Abramson says.

Prescription for Change

Ken Johnson, senior vice president of Pharmaceutical Research and
Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), says that FDA drug approval procedures are
"the gold standard of the world" and that the United States has "one of the
strongest drug safety records." He acknowledges, though, that "adverse
reactions are sometimes not detected until a medicine has been approved and
made available to an entire population," adding, "That's why the postmarket
surveillance system is so important." He notes that under the Food and Drug
Administration Amendments Act of 2007
<http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h110-3580> , the agency has
new authority to "require additional postmarket studies and make faster
changes to product labeling." The intent is to reduce the time it takes to
detect adverse drug reactions and protect the public.

 

An adverse reaction is exactly what Duane Graveline suspects happened to
him. Graveline, a former NASA astronaut and flight surgeon, suffered a
bizarre episode in 1999 shortly after he was prescribed the popular statin
drug Lipitor
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics
/lipitor_drug/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>  for his elevated
cholesterol. Just six weeks after he began taking the drug, the normally
very active and healthy Graveline plunged down the rabbit hole when he
abruptly lost his memory. His wife rushed him to the hospital, where doctors
examined him carefully but could find no medical or psychiatric problem. His
brain scan showed no sign of a stroke or brain disorder. Then, almost as
quickly as his memory had disappeared, it came back after just six hours,
without any treatment. Doctors termed the strange episode transient global
amnesia, or TGA. The cause? Unknown.

 

Graveline's case was certainly unusual. Most people with sudden memory loss
have suffered a blow to the head, a stroke, or some other medical problem.
But Graveline had no history of medical or psychiatric troubles. This made
him wonder: Could the episode have been a side effect of Lipitor? Deciding
not to test fate, Grave­line stopped taking the drug. For the next year he
was fine. But when his annual astronaut's physical exam rolled around, he
was told that his cholesterol level had crept up again, and his doctor urged
him to restart the Lipitor.

 

Graveline, still uncertain about the connection between the drug and TGA,
complied. Within 10 weeks he suffered another, even more severe episode of
amnesia. His wife found him wandering outside their home, unable to
recognize her and unaware even that he was a physician. That episode also
resolved without treatment. "That's when I decided never to take statins
again," he said. That's also when Graveline began scouring the medical
literature for an explanation of what had happened. What he found troubled
him: There were few studies examining statins' side effects on memory, even
though cholesterol, he says, plays an important role in brain function.
Graveline worried: What if he had had an episode while he was driving? What
if a pilot developed TGA during flight?

 

Graveline's research eventually brought him into contact with Beatrice
Golomb <http://www.cnl.salk.edu/%7Ebgolomb/> , an associate professor of
medicine at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine.
Golomb, a dark-haired whiz kid who graduated from the University of Southern
California with highest honors at age 19, is an M.D. with a Ph.D. in biology
and has been studying cholesterol and statins for more than a decade under
research grants given by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harry
Frank Guggenheim Foundation.

 

Golomb says that Graveline's episodes of TGA, and other cases like his,
raise questions about the ways statins can affect memory. Her research, she
says, shows that although statins can reduce the risk of heart attack, they
may also have serious side effects
<http://www.statinanswers.com/effects.htm> . In Golomb's opinion, the
potential benefits of statins may not outweigh their risks except among
middle-aged men who have heart disease—or who are at high risk for it. The
only way to weigh risks against benefits, she says, is to evaluate all-cause
morbidity (sickness) and all-cause mortality (death).

 

Christopher Loder, a spokesperson for Pfizer, the maker of Lipitor, says
that studies of the drug were "not designed nor powered to look specifically
at all-cause mortality." The studies, he says, "were powered and designed to
look at a composite end point consisting of heart attack or death from
coronary causes." In addition, Loder says, "There is overwhelming clinical
evidence to support the benefit of Lipitor. All statins have been shown to
reduce LDL cholesterol."

 

Golomb says one reason many doctors overlook risks and believe statins to be
safe is that most controlled studies of statins wind up excluding people who
originally begin to participate in a study but stop taking the drug because
they experience problems from it; these test participants are then dropped
from the study as "noncompliant." Confusion arises, Golomb says, "because
the absence of evidence that statins cause harm—having excluded those who
would have permitted detection of harm—is interpreted wrongly as evidence of
absence of harm. And the treatment is generalized to a larger population
with a very different risk-to-benefit profile."

 

John Abramson, a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School and author of
Overdo$ed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine
<http://www.amazon.com/Overdosed-America-Promise-American-Medicine/dp/006056
8526> , says he grew concerned when he learned that the authors of
professional guidelines recommending an expanded use of statins had ties to
the drugs' manufacturers. So, Abramson, a tall, dark-haired man with owlish
glasses, decided to review the study data. What he found stunned him.
Statins could reduce heart attacks and strokes—but only in a small fraction
of the people taking the drugs. "Doctors give statins in one of two ways,"
Abramson explains. "The first way is to give the drugs to people with
elevated cholesterol as primary prevention—to prevent a heart attack,
stroke, or other serious cardiovascular event. [These are] people who have
never suffered any of those events. The other way to give statins is as
secondary prevention, after people have had one of those events or develop
diabetes."

 

Despite broad recommendations in the National Cholesterol Education Program
guidelines, Abramson found that there were no studies that showed statins
were beneficial
<http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/01/29/healthscience/29well.php>  for
primary prevention for women of any age or men over 65. Yet more than
three-quarters of people taking statins take them for primary
prevention—meaning that many patients stand to gain no benefit at all.
Abramson, who with a colleague published his findings in the British medical
journal The Lancet <http://www.thelancet.com/> , says that even when statins
are used for men at the highest risk, "you have to treat about 238 men for
one year to prevent one heart attack."

 

Another problem with statin studies, according to Abramson, is that many do
not measure clinically and critically important outcomes like heart attacks,
serious adverse events, or all-cause mortality. Instead they measure
surrogate markers—outcomes that are associated with a risk of disease—but
not a bad outcome itself. In the case of statins, the surrogate marker most
commonly used is cholesterol levels. If a drug reduces cholesterol, it is
said to be "effective." But lowering cholesterol doesn't necessarily mean a
drug will reduce the bad outcomes people are worried about—such as death or
heart attack.

 

This was the issue in last winter's congressional investigation into the
nonstatin cholesterol-lowering drug ezetimibe, sold as Zetia and contained
in Vytorin. Hearings in January revealed that the release of negative
results of a clinical trial of ezetimibe had been delayed. The drug, while
lowering cholesterol effectively, failed to slow the progression of carotid
artery plaque. While manufacturers Merck and Schering-Plough delayed the
negative study's release for more than 18 months, ezetimibe had turned into
a blockbuster drug, even though it had never been shown to reduce heart
attacks or deaths.

 

"You can lower cholesterol levels with a drug, yet provide no health
benefits whatsoever," Abramson says. "And dying with a corrected cholesterol
level is not a successful outcome in my book." Suddenly Abramson, who had
taken many hits for his critiques of cholesterol-lowering drugs, was joined
by physicians calling for more openness in research
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/07/business/07trials.html>  and more careful
examination of the evidence before drugs are put on the market.

 

Jerome Hoffman of UCLA agrees, saying it is a shame that in the face of so
many medical and pharmacological advances there is such an exposure to risk.
"It's ironic that one of the unintended consequences of the publication of
so many untenable claims, based on poorly done research and spin, is that it
can obscure true advances when they do occur," he says. Citing the number of
great successes medical research has brought us—lifesaving drugs from
penicillin to insulin, along with invaluable treatments and medical
devices—he adds, "It's one more reason why we have to be appropriately
skeptical, unafraid to speak out about misleading claims, and insistent upon
holding clinical research to the standards of science."

 

Read the related article Drugmakers: Prepare for a Smackdown
<http://discovermagazine.com/2008/jul/20-wonder-drugs-that-can-kill/20-drugm
akers-prepare-for-a-smackdown> . 

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