Replies to post #51989 on Biotech Values

[bladerunner1717]

I'm not sure that this is relevant to the discussion or not.

I started taking Lipitor, prescribed by my physician, but the side effects were more than I could handle. He then tried Prevachol. Not any better for side effects. He then tried a drug that he likes for people that have side effect issues with the statins, Lescol. He said the effiacy was supposed to be inferior to Lipitor, but his patients generally prefered it, because of side effect issues. I concur with his other patients. Lescol lowered my LDL by almost 50%, but my doc thought the HDL was too low, so he prescribed Niaspan. 500mg didn't do much, but 1000mg/day raised my HDL by about 40%. (The flushing is a bit of a drag but not really overwhelming, although my best friend who is taking a combination of Crestor and Niaspan discontinued the Niaspan because of the flushing.

I don't know enough to say whether side effect issues are relevant to the discussion of switching from one statin to another, but I can tell you from my personal experience that not all statins are created equal.


Bladerunner

[iwfal]

That’s a reasonable premise, IMO. The plausible options for switching such patients in the hopes of obtaining better efficacy are: i) Crestor, and ii) Vytorin.

This is a 1997 to 2005 study (and most of the events would have been driven by the earlier patients). Crestor and Vytorin are both, what, 2002 or 2003 approvals?

The key point is that the switch has to be within class if there are no other strong competitor classes. Even now a poor efficacy from a statin is better than a good efficacy from Zetia. E.g. - My cardiologist explicitly pointed out that he might switch me between statins because no statin is uniformly best.