So-called ‘risk calculator’ looking like just another way to sell statins

Last year I warned you about the latest carnival game in Big Pharma’s world, the “heart risk calculator.”

It was a joint project of the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology that was supposed to give us an easy way to calculate our 10-year risk of heart disease.

And it sure is easy! All you have to do is take a seven-question quiz.

Are you a guy over 60? Well, don’t even bother answering the other six questions because you already won! Get your Rx for Lipitor on the way out the door.

And even if you’re younger, or a woman, you’ll likely get a prize, too. Because just about 50 percent of everyone over 40 qualifies for a statin with this new game.

Not that I’m the only one who thought this sounded a little fishy…

Experts from Harvard and the Cleveland Clinic also warned that it needed further evaluation before being “implemented on a widespread basis.”

But now a big study has finally confirmed what a crazy idea this is. Of course, if you asked me, we really didn’t need researchers crunching numbers to figure this one out, but since they already did, here are the results.

The calculator will overestimate your risk of heart disease by a net average of 78 percent.

And as if that wasn’t bad enough, for guys, the study found the risk of a wrong “diagnosis” to be as high as 154 percent.

But the mere fact a study was published showing how useless this calculator is doesn’t mean it will be tossed in the trash.

Because Pfizer’s currently hard at work trying to get its cash cow, Lipitor, out from behind the pharmacy counter and sold as an OTC drug.

And what’s better than having Lipitor go OTC? Why, having an additional 13 million people convinced they need to take it…

Source:

“Another study shows ACC/AHA risk calculator overestimates CVD events” Michael O’Riordan, February 18, 2015, Medscape, medscpe.com