Real Quackery

According to the Daily Mail the ingredient used to colour Peking duck can cut the risk of dying from heart disease by a third and cancer by two-thirds.

Researchers looking at red yeast rice said the benefits of the Chinese food colouring even seemed to outstrip those of statins - the much vaunted cholesterol-lowering drugs. Describing the effects as ' profound', they said extract of the fermented rice could play an important part in improving heart health.

It was only a couple of weeks ago that the government told us that we needed to take more Statins to lower Cholesterol.

GPs were being asked to trawl through patient records to pick out "high-risk" patients who would benefit from them. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) estimate 1.5m extra adults will need treatment. at an estimated cost of of £50m initially and £35m annually.

Now it looks like we just need to pop down to the local Chinese Takeaway to sort it all out. Maybe Chinese Herbal medicine has a real benefit!

P.S. For an explanation to the actual study behind this see this article. It concludes

This study provides good evidence that the red rice extract XZK reduces “bad” cholesterol and subsequent cardiovascular events in Chinese people who have already experienced a heart attack. This finding is not surprising, as this extract contains lovastatin, a cholesterol-lowering compound that is already known to reduce cardiovascular risk.
People tend to think that substances extracted from plants must be better for us than “medicines”, and cannot be harmful. However, this is not the case. The contents of medicines such as statins are carefully tested and regulated, and they contain known concentrations of the active drug. Substances sold as health supplements are not so strictly regulated, therefore their contents may vary widely and cannot be guaranteed to be safe. For this reason, people who are concerned about their risk of heart attack or their cholesterol levels should talk to their GP, who may prescribe them a statin, rather than taking red rice extracts.

Quack medicine: Peking duck is 'better for your heart than statins' Mail Online

Experts' plan to cut heart deaths

All well and good in this article but look at the following from NHSBLOGDOC.

Also have a look at The Scotsman and some of the comments.

Is this driven by a want for profit or is it a good thing. As he says Statins are big business. Very big business.

I saw five patients today who are on statins, and they all had questions about safety, and memory loss and the "new statin" that has turned out to be dangerous. I worry about this more and more. I ask myself, how much do I REALLY know about the efficacy and safety of these drugs? I am merely the victim of the latest reseach paper.

Pfizer’s next big drug for heart disease (torcetrapib which was slated to replace Lipitor) has bombed in trials, causing sufficient deaths that the trials have been ended early and development has been stopped. This is obviously dreadful news for Pfizer, and I assume that the stock will be well done on Monday. But that’s how the pharma business is supposed to work—big bets on new blockbusters may not pan out, but others will do so. (Matthew Holt)

Statins are big business. Very big business.

An academic colleague in the Southern Hemisphere sends me regular updates on the dangers of statins. He draws my attention to this:

Frank Cooper - author of "Cholesterol and the French Paradox".

France is a nation of 62,000,000 people who have been eating foods high in saturated fats and cholesterol for a long time, and yet they enjoy very low levels of heart disease. Frank will explain how the French eat 3 times as much fat and cholesterol as Americans yet have 1/3 the deaths from heart attacks. (Source)

Popular medicine, maybe. But can someone explain it to me? Then I can explain it to my patients.

BBC NEWS | Scotland | Experts' plan to cut heart deaths