One of the key issues to emerge from the recent spat between Sir Rory Collins and the BMJ about statins (1) has been the refusal of the Cholesterol Treatments Trialists’ Collaboration (CTT) at Oxford University to allow open access to the original clinical trial data. The independent panel set up by the editor of the […]
The banking industry quite rightly suffers from public opprobrium because of its role in the financial crisis, manipulation of the bank rate and mis-selling of various products. By contrast the pharmaceutical industry is somewhat more highly regarded. Nevertheless recent examples of unethical behaviour indicate that the approach to business in this sector does not exactly
On 23 September 2004 a number of distinguished medical and health professionals wrote a detailed letter to the officials in the US National Cholesterol Education Program (NCEP) requesting an independent review of the cholesterol guidelines(1). Although this was some years ago the key points raised are just as pertinent to-day as they were when the
A major study has reported that women who use statins have a much higher risk of developing diabetes mellitus(DM) when compared women who do not. This is one the results obtained in the Women’s Health Initiative(WHI) which is being conducted in the USA(1). The WHI recruited 161,808 postmenopausal women aged 50 to 79 years at
There is now ample evidence to show that low cholesterol (TC) per se is linked to a range of adverse side-effects including an increase in the incidence of violent deaths and suicide. A meta-analysis found that observational studies (including cohort, case–control, and cross-sectional studies) consistently showed increased violent death and violent behaviours in persons with