Today’s NY times gets very excited about the ability of statins to lower cholesterol and therefore reduce the risk of heart disease. In particular they cite the improvement you get from getting LDL below the consensus "normal" levels. Of course as the article called Just how low can you go? points out, this is great news for the statin makers.  Only around 10% of those who seem to be indicated for statins are actually taking them.  On the other hand scaremongers (i.e. this blog and others) keep pointing out that there can be side-effects from statins, which include severe muscle pain and some say long-term amnesia.  While it’s OK for the NY Times to act as Pfizer’s PR company on occasion (and this may actually be one of them), and to correctly point out that the incidence of side-effects is very, very low, they might have noted another study out yesterday.  That study, in the British Medical Journal suggested that a new blockbuster drug you may have heard of called aspirin was found equally efficacious and far more cost-effective in preventing heart disease than statins. And not just a little more, but by a factor of 20.

The full paper admits that aspirin use does have side-effects (usually stomach bleeding), but obviously, as in the case of the Cox-2 inhibitors, the patients could be started on that regimen and switched to statins if they can’t handle the aspirin.  Overall this study should give pause to the statin manufacturers.  In the UK where the government already concedes that its paying too much for statins and is trying to move them OTC, this could be the start of a movement to replace them with a rather more mature and much cheaper product! In the US where cost-effectiveness is not a recognized concept, don’t expect too much attention to be paid. But as we eventually (i.e in ten years time) move into an era where the government and public starts to expect value for money from drug companies as well as miracle cures, this type of analysis will become more common and more important.