Opinion: Preventing heart disease requires more than medicine
It would be wonderful if a pill wiped away big threats to our health. But to achieve that goal, we need more than medicine.
Like more than half of older men, I take a cholesterol-lowering medication called a statin. Sometimes that seems a bit strange, because I don’t have high cholesterol. My doctor prescribed it based on a formula that largely hinges on age and sex.
I’m 71 and male. Those two factors alone put me in the high-risk category for having a heart attack or stroke in the next 10 years. Most men over age 60, and virtually all of them age 68 or older, fall into this category.
I religiously take this medication because I don’t want to be the smartest skeptic in the graveyard. Yet an aggregation of shows that, for people like me without heart disease, the average statin-wrought reduction in cholesterol reduces the chances of dying from any cause by
