David Guest wrote:
a message pops up saying "Give this patient Lipitor,
you loser"... The bottom line, however, is that death
from heart disease is lower. So it's all good.
Except there are more cost-effective statins than Lipitor - see below.
Cheers,
Ken
--
Dr. Ken Harvey
Adjunct Senior Research Fellow
School of Public Health, La Trobe University
http://www.medreach.com.au
VOIP: +61 (03) 9029 0634; Mobile +61 (04) 1918 1910
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Pfizer Backtracks on the Benefit of Atorvastatin Over Simvastatin:
"Programming Error" in Flawed Study Cited
from Heartwire — a professional news service of WebMD
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/558491?src=mp
Michael O'Riordan
June 18, 2007 (New York, NY) – The availability of simvastatin as a
generic drug for patients with high cholesterol levels expectedly put
the heat on atorvastatin (Lipitor), Pfizer's blockbuster statin that is
still the world's best-selling medication. In fending off simvastatin,
sold by Merck and Co as Zocor, Pfizer has claimed that its drug prevents
more cardiovascular events than the generically available simvastatin.
That was the gist of a press release issued by Pfizer this past March, a
release based on a study by Dr Robert Vogel (University of Maryland,
Baltimore) and presented at the American Heart Association's annual
conference on Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention. In
that study, Pfizer said that among those taking statins for at least
three months, the risk of cardiovascular events, after adjustment for
dose, was 14% lower in patients who took atorvastatin compared with
simvastatin.
Now, however, the company is backing away from those findings, claiming
that the benefit observed in the study was just 10%, a between-treatment
difference that did not meet statistical significance. Pfizer issued a
two-paragraph statement with the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC)
stating the previous findings were incorrect, the result of a
"programming error" that came to light only after the study was
submitted to an unnamed medical journal, according to the Wall Street
Journal [1].
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