Currently in the United Kingdom, only people with a risk greater than 10% of suffering a heart attack in the next ten years can be prescribed statins aimed at lowering their cholesterol. A draft revision of these guidelines could lead, at the end of May, to lower the limit of its recommendations to anyone over 18including those with a heart disease risk below the 10% threshold.
Millions of Healthy People Who Suddenly Become Potential “Patients”
For freelance health journalist Maryanne Demasi (also a former researcher with a doctorate in rheumatology), which reveals the information on its site, lowering this prescription threshold for statins would mean that « of the millions of healthy people would become, overnight, “patients” simply because of the lowering of the criteria for prescribing statins. »
This proposal would follow a publication by the British Heart Foundation according to which, since the arrival of Covid, there have been more than 30,000 additional deaths linked to heart attacks and strokes. For Sir Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer of the United Kingdom, the decrease in the consumption of statins during the pandemic would certainly have contributed to this excess mortality.
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A commission plagued by conflicts of interest?
However Maryanne Demasi cites British doctors who point out the lack of evidence of a decline in the prescription of this type of drug over the past three years, according to public data. Similarly, the journalist is surprised that the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) maintains its proposal when growing strong scientific evidence indicates that excess LDL cholesterol is not as significant a risk factor as previously thought for heart disease. It reports the point of view of eminent specialists alerting to the fact that the benefits of these drugs are unlikely to outweigh their risks when prescribed to healthy people.
Already in 2014, NICE had taken such a measure by lowering the threshold for prescribing statins to people with a 20% risk of heart disease to those at a 10% risk of heart disease with “ virtually no beneficial effects observed at the end of this lowering of the threshold. Should we see a link with the fact that eight of the twelve members of this commission had financial links with companies manufacturing statins (as recently revealed by the British journalist Lucy Johnson)? The question indeed arises…
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