"Americans may be too fat, but at least their cholesterol is low. For the first time in nearly 50 years, the average cholesterol level for U.S. adults is in the ideal range, the government reported Wednesday."How do we do it?
"The growing use of cholesterol-lowering pills in middle-aged and older people is believed to be a key reason for the improvement, experts said. When the survey began in 1960, the average cholesterol was at 222.While Americans have gotten much heavier since then, they've been able to lower their cholesterol with powerful drugs that carry few if any side effects. High cholesterol can clog arteries and lead to heart disease."
How did we do it?
"Doctors' groups have increasingly recommended more aggressive use of these drugs in patients seen to be at risk from heart disease. And screening has become common — two-thirds of men and three-fourths of women had been screened for high cholesterol in the previous five years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The result? Cholesterol medications are the top-selling class of U.S. drugs, and sales have grown steadily from about $13 billion in 2002 to nearly $22 billion in 2006, according to IMS Health, a Connecticut-based consulting company that monitors pharmaceutical sales.
'There's been an explosion in the use of these medications, and appropriately so in the majority of cases,' said Dr. Elizabeth Jackson, a preventive cardiologist at the University of Michigan Medical Center."
An "explosion" two-fer! Ka-boom and Ka-ching!
The reality without drugs?
"'If you take away the people on medication, I don't think there's been as much of a meaningful improvement as we would like,' he said."
Congrats to us! We know how to win.
Drugs.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment