Your Medical Mind_ How to Decide What Is Right for You - Jerome Groopman [96]
4 An analysis of therapy for high blood pressure showing a beneficial trend with intensive treatment as requested by Michelle Byrd. These data are not statistically significant but taken by some experts to favor tight control of blood pressure: Blood Pressure Lowering Treatment Trialists’ Collaboration, “Effects of different regimens to lower blood pressure on major cardiovascular events in older and younger adults: Meta-analysis of randomised trials,” British Medical Journal 336 (2008), doi:10.1136/bmj.39548.738368.BE.
5 Alex Miller’s comments about “changing the goalposts” reflect evolving definitions of what is normal and abnormal blood pressure, and the cutoffs for treatment, by expert committees in the United States: Avram V. Chobanian et al., “The Seventh Report of the Joint National Committee on Prevention, Detection, Evaluation, and Treatment of High Blood Pressure: The JNC 7 Report,” JAMA 289 (2003), pp. 2560–2572. It is noteworthy that there are different “goalposts” in Europe, more akin to the prior cutoffs in the United States: Giuseppe Mancia et al., “2007 Guidelines for the Management of Arterial Hypertension: The Task Force for the Management of Arterial Hypertension of the European Society of Hypertension (ESH) and of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC),” Journal of Hypertension 25 (2007), pp. 1105–1187. An excellent study of differences in patient and physician views on benefit versus risk in treating hypertension: Finlay A. McAlister et al., “When should hypertension be treated? The different perspectives of Canadian family physicians and patients,” Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) 163 (2000), pp. 403–408.
6 The fundamentals of health literacy in assessing clinical information are presented in an excellent primer: Steven Woloshin, Lisa M. Schwartz, H. Gilbert Welch, Know Your Chances: Understanding Health Statistics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
CHAPTER 1: WHERE AM I IN THE NUMBERS?
10 Data on statin prescriptions are found in Jennifer Couzin-Frankel, “U.S. panel favors wider use of preventive drug treatment,” Science 327 (2010), pp. 130–131; BMJ Group, “High cholesterol: Statins for people with heart disease,” Best Health, September 14, 2009; Erica S. Spatz, Maureen E. Canavan, Mayur M. Desai, “From here to Jupiter: Identifying new patients for statin therapy using data from the 1999–2004 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey,” Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality & Outcomes 2 (2009), pp. 41–48; David Mann et al., “Trends in statin use and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels among U.S. adults: Impact of the 2001 National Cholesterol Education Program Guidelines,” Annals of Pharmacotherapy 42 (2008), pp. 1208–1215.
10 The discovery of statin drugs and their development as therapeutics by one of the Japanese scientists central to the work: Akira Endo, “The discovery and development of HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors,” Journal of Lipid Research 33 (1992), pp. 1569–1582.
11 Data on the frequency of muscle pain and inflammation from statin medications: Tisha R. Joy, Robert A. Hegele, “Narrative review: Statin-related myopathy,” Ann Intern Med 150 (2009), pp. 858–868; Julia Hippisley-Cos, Carol Coupland, “Unintended effects of statins in men and women in England and Wales: Population based cohort study using the QResearch database,” BMJ 340 (2010) c2197, doi:10.1136/bmj.c2197.
11 One of the key studies relevant to treatment of people with elevated cholesterol and no prior history of heart disease, like Susan Powell, is Ian Ford et al., “Long-term follow-up of the West of Scotland Coronary Prevention Study,” NEJM 357 (2007), pp. 1477–1486.
12 Data on how many patients decline to take prescribed medication or do not adhere to the regimen: Lars Osterberg, Terrence Blaschke, “Adherence to medication,” NEJM 353 (2005), pp. 487–497; Joshua S. Benner et al., “Long-term persistence in use of statin therapy in elderly patients,” JAMA 288 (2002), pp. 455–461; Mark Peyrot et al., “Correlates of insulin injection