Stephanie Saul has found the formula to make the front page of the NY Times: write article about the Rx industry that depict their products as unsafe or demonstrate an unholy link between clinical guidelines and industry support. Oh, and ignore the facts when you have to in order to keep the story line in shape. The most recent example of Stephanie’s shameless stylistics is today’s article entitled, “Unease on Industry’s Role in Hypertension Debate ” which starts out by noting that drug companies paid $700k ” to a medical society that used most of the money on a series of dinner lectures last year to brief doctors on the latest news about high blood pressure…. The same three companies â Merck, Novartis and Sankyo â also gave the money that the medical society used to formulate the main talking point of those briefings, an expanded concept of high blood pressure that many doctors say would increase the number of people taking drugs. …”
Let’s get one thing straight first. Most people with hypertension don’t take drugs and those that do fail to take them regularly or appropriately. So is it a bad thing to increase the numbe rof people taking drugs given the fact that high blood pressure is the leading cause of strokes and heart attack in the world and taking such drugs will cut strokes 35 to 40 percent and heart attacks 20 to 25 percent?
Now what Stephanie is talking about is something call pre-hypertension. No one seems to quibble about treating pre-cancer though fewer people die from cancer than heart disease but no matter. Or that from both a mechanistic and epidemiological level is pretty flat out certain that both elevation of blood pressure and lipid levels begin early in life, even in childhood in some people. Didn’t read that in Stephanie’s screed? What a suprise. High blood pressure was listed as a primary or contributing cause of death in about 277,000 American deaths in the year 2003. About 69 percent of people who have a first heart attack, 77 percent of those who have a first stroke, and 74 percent of patients with heart failure have blood pressure higher than 140/90 mmHg. Since blood pressure rises rapdily the idea is to prevent the exponential rise by getting to people who are on the cusp before it does as a way to stop hypertension before it starts. On the number of people on the cusp — prehypertenion — have been rising rapidly as well. So researchers wanted to see if you could slow the progression to hypertension by giving folks on the cusp blood pressure drugs. It did.
But all Stephanie could see was that Astra Zeneca paid for the study, not the potential public health beneifits of lowering blood pressure earlier than ever or the the fact that efforts to do so through diet and exercise alone have been a miserable failure. Obesity epidemic anyone?
Also, she left out some interesting facts. That the two “heroes” of her piece, Steve Nissen and Jean Sealey, have problems of their own. Nissen, medical director of the Cardiovascular Coordinating Center at The Cleveland Clinic, as followers of this blog know, abused his position as a FDA media talking head and FDA advisory committee member along with another malcontent on Stephanie’s speed dial, Curt Furberg, MD to recommend a black box warning on drugs for ADHD in order to slow what he characterized as the âout of control growthâ use of the drugs.
Meanwhile Stephanie depicts Sealey leaving the professional association of hypertension specialists as a principled decision and a outgrowth over a battle about Rx influence. In fact, Sealey was on the verge of being forced to resign for reasons that are being investigated by the New York State Attorney General. Amazing how that never made it into the New York Times. It’s enough to give you pre-high blood pressure.
