High-risk drug combo hyped as ‘cure’ for heart disease

Big Pharma is attempting to pull off one of its deadliest scams ever.

And with the help of the pharma-friendly mainstream media, it just might succeed.

You probably heard the big news last week about a “new” cholesterol drug that can “switch off” heart disease.

But this so-called new med is nothing more than a very risky, expensive shot that the FDA approved last year to lower cholesterol – combined with a high-dose statin.

And what it comes along with is a double-whammy of side effects that you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy.

A no-brainer

The best thing you can say about Amgen’s Repatha drug is that it’s selling like week-old cold pizza.

At a yearly cost of around $14,000, most insurance companies aren’t paying for it. And Big Pharma doesn’t spend a fortune to get a drug on the market just to watch it fail.

I first warned you about PCSK9 blockers like Repatha when they were just a glint in drugmakers’ eyes. And the more we learn about them, the worse it gets.

Even from the get-go it was known that they can drop your cholesterol levels to unheard-of, incredibly dangerous levels… numbers so low that they’re almost a prescription for dementia.

That’s right, dementia.

Why, even the FDA had sent a letter to drugmakers early on, warning of the potential of “neurocognitive adverse events” with these meds.

But despite all the red flags researchers were waving, Repatha got approved anyway. That, however, is hardly the end of the story. Actually, it’s just the beginning.

As I said, Repatha, which is given as a twice-monthly injection or once-a-month infusion, isn’t raking in the billions drugmakers had anticipated.

So enter the Amgen-sponsored study called GLAGOV. But really, it might just as well been called LASTDITCH, because unless insurance companies start paying for Repatha, some high-paid pharma heads are going to be looking for a new line of work.

GLAGOV finished up this year, and the results were recently published in JAMA and became a big topic of discussion at the American Heart Institute conference. But hard as Amgen tried, the best they came up with was a tiny, one percent drop in artery plaque for the group that took both a high-dose statin and got injected with Repatha for a year-and-a-half.

Even the statin-friendly experts who analyzed the results had to admit “it sounds small,” and that the study was “too small” to know if that one percent really meant anything.

Actually, the word “small” was used a lot to describe this study. But that didn’t stop the media from pitching it as if a cure for heart disease had been found.

Not only was it the lead story in the network TV news broadcasts, but news outlets all over the world ran stories saying things such as “Could a new drug reverse heart disease?” And, a “breakthrough cholesterol drug” that can “melt away” artery-clogging plaque.

Seriously? It’s more like melt away your ability to think and function!

Dr. Steven Nissen, who led the GLAGOV study and wrote the JAMA paper, said that it’s the “first time anyone has shown” these meds can do anything other than lower cholesterol.

Not exactly, Dr. Nissen.

It’s already been shown that statins can cause brain fog along with serious muscle pain and damage, significantly up your risk of developing diabetes, and, as I told you last year, trigger hardening of the arteries and heart failure.

Add to that a med that can wreak havoc on your brain like Repatha and you’ve got an Rx for disaster.

One cardiologist commented that while the study results appear small, “it’s still a win.”

But unfortunately the winners will be the drugmakers, and not the patients who end up taking this deadly combo.

“Could a new drug help reverse heart disease?” CBS News, November 16, 2016, cbsnews.com