Does calculator overstate heart attack risk?
http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/18/health/cholesterol-calculator/
When I first read an article about this new way of doing things that was expected to double or triple the number of people on statins I was very skeptical (see here for some earlier info), it sounded like a gimme to the pharmaceutical industry. I filled out their little calculator (an Excel spreadsheet; nice plug for Microsoft, eh?) with some figures I half remembered from my last blood tests and it said I was well under the 7.5% 10 year risk. However, it did say I was something like 5% which seemed quite high to me. I sent an email off to my wife (a nurse) and forgot about it. Until I read this interesting article that has this little bit in it…
Concerns about the calculator were first raised, according to the Times report, by Harvard Medical School professors Paul Ridker and Nancy Cook.
In an analysis to be published Tuesday in the medical journal The Lancet, a copy of which was obtained by CNN Ridker and Cook write they calculated 10-year risks using the tool and compared the data to event rates using three large previously-published studies in which participants’ characteristics such as age and smoking status were known.
The calculator “systematically overestimated observed risks by 75 to 150 percent, roughly doubling the actual observed risk,” they wrote.
CNN’s Elizabeth Cohen said when she used the calculator, putting in a 65-year-old man with normal cholesterol levels and no risk factors — normal blood pressure, no diabetes and a nonsmoker — the calculator said he needed statins.
Shocking, I know, to find out that there is likely to be an agenda behind something this momentous, but hey, this is the good old USofA where ordinary people are simply sheeple to be herded in ways to further the excess of the elite.
Go USA!
