Major hospital finds statin ‘risk calculator’ puts millions at risk
It’s the miscalculation that sold millions of bottles of statins.
For years I’ve been warning you about the heart disease risk calculator that thousands of doctors swear by.
You answer seven questions, and it’s supposed to tell you in an instant your chances of having a heart attack or stroke.
But a major new study has proven that this calculator is about as reliable as a fortune cookie.
And there’s a good chance it could leave you or someone you love on dangerous prescription meds you don’t need.
When I first heard about this heart risk calculator several years ago, I kept waiting for the punch line — because it sure sounded like a joke.
But it wasn’t.
The American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology, the two groups who created it, launched it with huge fanfare.
They even promised it was going to bring heart disease diagnosis into the 21st century.
Yeah, right. It turns out this thing is about as high-tech (and accurate) as trying to find water with a stick.
Researchers at Kaiser Permanente just wrapped up a study on the calculator — and they found it was overestimating heart disease risk by up to 600 percent!
That’s disgraceful! That means you could have a perfectly healthy heart and still leave your doctor’s office with statins or other drugs — all because of this shoddy test.
In fact, lead researcher Dr. Alan Go says you can bet your last dollar that we’re “over-treating a good many people based on the risk calculator.”
And that’s putting it kindly. The actual number could be astronomical.
But let’s be really clear about something. This calculator isn’t broken — it’s actually doing the two (and only two) things it was designed to do:
1) Give you a bunch of no-win questions to make sure you fail. This includes such insightful, hard-hitters like whether you’re over 60.
2) Make sure you end up on statins. Researchers estimated that this calculator could create 13 million new customers for the drugs.
This calculator is such a joke that a group of Harvard researchers actually tried to stop it from ever being released. They said it was so problematic and poorly designed, we shouldn’t be using it on anyone.
But instead of trashing the calculator, the mainstream used it to hand out millions of statins prescriptions instead.
Now some pharma-friendly docs will tell you this is no big deal. Even if the calculator over-estimated your risk of heart disease a bit, popping a daily statin isn’t going to kill you.
Like heck it won’t.
Just a few months back, I told you about a study out of Texas that looked at otherwise healthy active-duty and retired soldiers and their families. Those who started taking statins increased their diabetes risk by a whopping 87 percent.
They were also 250 percent more likely to develop some of the worst diabetes complications out there — things like nerve damage, vision loss and kidney disease.
If you or someone you love is taking statins or any other heart med — and you remember some short quiz being part of the diagnostic process — do yourself a favor that could change (or even save) your life.
Go get a second opinion.
Sources:
“Why your heart disease risk may not be as high as you think” Alice Park, May 2, 2016, Time, time.com
