Are You Aware That The ALLHAT Statin Trial Was A FAILURE?!

Are You Aware That The ALLHAT Statin Trial Was A FAILURE?

ARE YOU AWARE THAT

The effect of statin therapy on the incidence of CHD mortality in the MAJOR Trial ALLHAT was VIRTUALLY NIL

ALLHAT

Pravastatin 10- 40mg
4.8 years

Hypertensive males and females >55 years old 15% with CHD . 35 % with diabetes

Number of participants Drug/Control 5170/5185


CHD deaths 160/162

Total deaths 631/641

Relative Risk for CHD mortality -1%

Relative Risk for Total Mortality -1%


This is ALL in Anthony Colpo's book "The Great Cholesterol Con"

Again, how hard is it to include the article's name? I was able to find out why in the pravastatin treatment group, the trial failed to show a benefit in either the primary outcome (all-cause mortality) or the key secondary outcome (combined nonfatal myocardial infarction and fatal coronary heart disease) from an article in JAMA.

"Several practical issues and fundamental factors influenced this trial. First, the groups were evenly matched in virtually all respects, except that the usual care group had a statistically significant but clinically insignificant larger number of patients with preexisting coronary heart disease. More important, by year 6 of the study, only 70.3% of patients in the treatment group were still taking the protocol-specified 40 mg of pravastatin, whereas 28.5% of the usual care group was receiving a lipid-lowering drug (26.1% received a statin). Lack of adherence and crossover rates increased during the trial, the latter possibly related to publication of the 4S study (Scandinavian Simvastatin Survival Study), the first large statin prevention trial, in 1994, soon after ALLHAT started.3 Although the reduction in total cholesterol in the ALLHAT-LLT treatment group was comparable to that seen in other statin trials,4-7 the reported decrease in LDL-C was not based on the total sample, only on a 10% random subset of participants in the pravastatin group and 5% of participants in the usual care group. Moreover, because of reduced adherence and the large degree of crossover, the difference in total cholesterol and the apparent difference in LDL-C between the 2 groups were modest and substantially less than the differences reported in other statin trials. The difference in percentage changes in total cholesterol between the pravastatin and usual care groups (9.6% for ALLHAT-LLT) is markedly lower than the mean difference for all trials, even when ALLHAT-LLT is included (18.5% for all trials). Six of the 8 other trials had at least twice the total cholesterol differential between groups compared with that seen in ALLHAT-LLT."

P.S. This is a quote from a primary souce (journal article), instead of a quote from as secondary source (Colpo's book).