So smoking cannabis is just as unhealthy as smoking tobacco.
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You mean repeatedly and deliberately inhaling burned plants and paper into your lungs isn’t a good idea? Who ever could have known!
Pretty interesting. This is my exact research field, pretty much, and I spent a lot of hours looking at rat MI models and echo, haha. I will point out that lots of things can show these massive changes in cardiac function rats, but don’t translate to humans. But this paper is cool that they actually used mice with a form of DCM. Ok, it’s induced in a “fake” way using a drug to poison the pancreas, but it’s still an upgrade over the young healthy rodents used in most studies.
I can definitely believe the results. We know Atorvastatin has a ton of diverse effects, not just for lipid lowering.
They used 2.5mg/kg intravenous. Converting rat to human, we divide by 6.2, which is 0.4 mg/kg, or 28mg for a 70kg human. That’s a very normal dose for oral consumption and would be very easy to implement. However, I am not aware of any atorvastatin formulated for IV administration.
A previous study from the same group (Intravenous Statin Administration During Myocardial Infarction Compared With Oral Post-Infarct Administration - PubMed) did compare oral versus intravenous, and found that IV was more effective, no surprise. And the bolus seems to be key, since daily oral Atorvastatin post-MI was less effective. That points to some sort of acute cardioprotection.
The authors have patents for IV atorvastatin, so clearly they’re incentivized to show that IV is better. However, the obvious question in my mind is whether you could overcome it just by using a bigger oral dose. Like, going to 80mg, or even 150mg, as an acute single dose post-MI would be nothing too crazy or risky IMO.
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NY is coming on to the interstate medical compact - so long as they pass legislation that has been introduced. Then it is easy to get a license - it’s just a few, but no paperwork.
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New Evidence on the benefits of statins for CVD prevention in older adults with CKD
Using a new-user study design and target trial emulation framework with intention-to-treat as the primary analysis, the authors observed a significant protective association of statins with CVD and mortality outcomes for those newly prescribed a statin compared with those who were not. For the composite of CVD events (myocardial infarctions, heart failure, or stroke), the hazard ratio (HR) was 0·94 (95% CI 0·89–0·99) in the group aged 75–84 years and 0·88 (0·79–0·99) in the group aged 85 years and older. For all-cause mortality, the HR was 0·87 (95% CI 0·82–0·91) in the group aged 75–84 years and 0·89 (0·81–0·98) in the group aged 85 years and older. The results of a per-protocol analysis showed a stronger protective association for both CVD and mortality outcomes for those who were prescribed a statin, at all age groups.
Open access:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanhl/article/PIIS2666-7568(25)00017-0/fulltext
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Because of its association with CVD, CKD, morbidity, and mortality, uric acid should be monitored closely and treated aggressively. The normal range of uric acid in the blood is between 3.5 and 7.2 mg/dl. But normal is not normal for some people. Some people could have an attack of gout at 6.0 or lower. There is a school of thought that says gout may be asymptomatic at levels as low as 5. Asymptomatic at the joints but still corroding your system.
The same school of thought indicates that those at risk for major diseases should probably start on a low dose of allopurinol or febuxostat. Both work the same way and both get mostly good reviews. Uric acid should be treated like blood pressure, where lower is generally better.
Butter, tallow, and full fat milk is back.
Sigh.
You reap what you sow, and it’s going to be a grim one.
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Wait, what happened in 2010?! From lowest mortality a hockey stick rocketing up, super sharp reversal! Also very contrary to expectation, for many decades (1984 - 2011) women were substantially more likely to die from CVD?! Odd.
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In 2013 strict guidelines for LDL were eliminated by the ACC/AHA.
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Why did things change in 2010?
Marat Fudim, MD, an associate professor in the Duke Department of Medicine and lead author of the study published April 24 in JAMA Cardiology, points to widespread obesity and rising rates of diabetes and hypertension putting more people at risk for heart failure.8 May 2024
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I agree. Most of the measurements we get, such as LDL, are just indicators of the main problem, which is obesity.
Chances are that if your BMI is in the low normal range, your lipids will be normal, and your risk of heart disease will be greatly reduced.
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I asked this question to the president of the American Heart Association recently, and he said it is likely due to the explosion in rates of obesity and insulin resistance (and diabetes).
He also says the whole paradigm will change due to GLP-1RA and SGLT2i drugs. Fatality rates from MI are getting lower, but we will likely have more people living with CVD, and living for longer. 27% of diabetics have heart failure, and just look at the number of diabetics - 40 million Americans, something like 140 million Chinese. (Chinese rates of diabetes are worse than the US, and it seems to hit them more severely).
This all means that there’s a “new” disease on the block - heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF, pronounced “heff-peff”) which is absolutely skyrocketing. That seems to be a disorder driven primarily by physical/mechanical issues (hypertension) combined with metabolic (insulin resistance).
The major issue, IMO, is that our “primordial prevention” at the society level is still completely lacking. Vast majority of doctors out there will say LDL-C of 100 is normal, and a chunk of the public think taking cholesterol-lowering drugs is poisonous (but donuts are fine), and they have an incredibly distorted view of what a healthy person should look like because almost everybody is overweight. It’s hard for me to comprehend what would have to happen for us to make a dent in the numbers.
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I don’t think people suddenly started to get fat in 2010. I spent a couple of months in S Korea in the early 2000’s and was shocked coming back to the US then as everyone looked obese compared to what I was used to in Korea.
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Yeah, sorry, none of the supplied explanations so far are convincing in the least. The lipid recommendation happened a couple of years later, whereas the rocket up of rates was strikingly evident 2010-2011. Plus deaths don’t rocket up within months of stopping statins. And obesity, insulin resistance were present in numbers for a long time by then, as mortality rates were still declining despite those rates, until a really bizarre u turn literally on a dime in 2010, seemingly within months. It’s as if a meteor struck. Almost seems like some kind of statistical artifact or data anomaly - maybe the methodology changed in some unacknowledged way. Just bizarre.
I used Manus (awesome AI agent) to generate a graph of CVD mortality Vs statin use - doesn’t agree at all with the chart above.
I’ve created a visualization showing the relationship between US cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality rates and statin use over the past 30+ years. Here are the key findings:
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There is a clear inverse relationship between CVD mortality rates and statin use since 1987 (when the first statin was approved in the US).
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CVD mortality rates have declined significantly, from approximately 330 per 100,000 in 1987 to 161.5 per 100,000 in 2019 (a reduction of about 51%).
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During the same period, statin use increased dramatically from less than 1% of adults in 1987 to 35% by 2019.
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A notable acceleration in statin use occurred after 2013, when the American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association (ACC/AHA) released new guidelines that significantly expanded the criteria for statin therapy.
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Between 2013 and 2019, statin use increased by 149%, from 37 million users to 92 million users
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Both have pretty severe side effects.
My hypothesis is that normies started to use the internet, searches for facebook peaked 2010, smartphones like iPhone were useful. It was too much power (unlimited information) in the hand of a normie, for better or worse. If there’s only a few factors that’s important for cardiovascular mortality, more information is probably not better.
Some interesting facts is that keto diet became popular in 2019, since then relative searches for “high cholesterol” doubled.
But I couldn’t find confirm that people thought e.g dietary guidelines were bad. People have searched for e.g “best butter” (red) much more than “best olive oil” (blue).
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The chart only shows an increase in 2015 (no datapoint before?): Cardiovascular Health - #1679 by AnUser
Here’s the trend for the topic “healthy user bias”, which is something you encounter when you start learning about low carb or keto and is used to dismiss observational studies as if that’s the only evidence, it started around 2015.
There’s a lot of videos, posts, etc, today, in favor of factors that increase cardiovascular disease and mortality.
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Not buying obesity rates as an explanation for the hockey stick. Male obesity rates did not drop from 1980 to 2010 and then spike up after 2010. If anything obesity has been steadily rising since 1980.