The Lesson of Vytorin in Cholesterol Control - it doesn't Matter how Low your Cholesterol Count Is
Merck's cholesterol control drug Vytorin is beginning to get attention for all the wrong reasons.Vytorin fights cholesterol with two compounds - Zocor to lower your cholesterol, and Zetia to help the body ignore the cholesterol taken with your food. With the two drugs together, they hoped they would attack cholesterol with a double whammy. You remember Vytorin, don't you? It's the drug they advertise on TV where they try to make you laugh showing you how it is possible to see that some people can remind you of certain foods - like tacos or pies.
When they first brought it to market, they must have tested it to see that the two drugs together did better than just one alone. But for some reason, they just tested the drug all over again recently; and they found out that Zocor by itself did everything that it was supposed to do only when combined with Zetia . Apparently, the addition of Zetia actually did nothing. Zocor brought down the build-up of cholesterol plaque on the insides of arteries just as well as it did when Zetia was added into the mix. There is nothing in this that could be interpreted as depressing news, right? Half the drug does just as well as all of it at cholesterol control. This should be good news.
It's just that doctors who have been prescribing the drug to their patients are swamped with calls now; and they keep trying to explain to the panicked patients who call that it's all going to be okay. The patients are reading up on Internet medical literature; they misinterpret everything, and get worked up over nothing. The funny thing is, Vytorin actually does work better than either one of those drugs do alone. It's just that it's no real use to you, as the build-up of cholesterol plaque in your arteries - the whole point of cholesterol control medication - seems none the better for it. Patients look at the line where it says that it does no better, and somehow in their minds, turn it into "it does much worse, in fact, it gives you a heart attack".
This study is interesting because it's made scientists look at the question of cholesterol control all afresh. Apparently it's not enough to lower the cholesterol that's going about in your blood. If you do lower it, your body somehow can make up for it and still put on as much cholesterol plaque on the arteries as if nothing were different. Scientists are also wondering about the whole "good cholesterol vs. bad cholesterol" debate. They wonder if it's enough to take down your bad cholesterol, your LDL. What if it's no use doing that, if you're not raising HDL at the same time for the best results in cholesterol control?
The way drugs like Zocor work (and Zocor belongs to a group of drugs known as statins), is that they get the liver to make less cholesterol. The reason we want to bring down cholesterol is, clogged arteries give rise to heart attacks. Vytorin does bring down cholesterol levels in the blood, but it makes no difference to how clogged your arteries turn out to be. In fact, lots of scientists around don't even believe that drugs are the best way to achieve cholesterol control. They would rather that their patients never took cholesterol-filled foods in the first place - prevention being better than cure.