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medpundit |
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Tuesday, July 16, 2002"Heart disease can be prevented, and we have to start at a young age to do it," says panel member Sidney Smith [not me], professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. The guidelines recommend: * Weight loss for those with a body mass index over 25 or waist measurement over 40 inches for men and 35 inches for women. * Moderate physical exercise 30 minutes per day, preferably every day. * Low-dose aspirin for patients with a 10% risk of developing heart disease within 10 years. * No exposure to tobacco smoke, including secondhand smoke. * Control of blood pressure and blood fats. * Regular pulse checks and treatment for atrial fibrillation, an irregular heartbeat associated with blood clot formation, which could lead to stroke. All of this seems benign and reasonable, but it will mean that more people will be on cholesterol lowering drugs for most of their lives. Start someone on a drug to lower cholesterol at 20, and there's a good chance he'll still be taking it by age 80. That's sixty years of daily drug exposure. Those drugs haven't been around that long. We don't know what kind of long term effects they may have on the body. We also don’t know how effective this approach will be at reducing heart disease. The panel is just assuming it will be worth the risks. It’s a recommendation based on the same sort of science that hormone replacement therapy was twenty or thirty years ago. A little bit of data and whole lot of supposition. posted by Sydney on 7/16/2002 05:48:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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