Six million patients given wrong prescription for statins
- Thousands are at risk in situation described by doctors as ‘public health priority’
- Doctors say GPs should not leave them on outdated prescription through inertia
- But patients are being told to wait until next appointment to get updated doses
Kate Pickles For The Daily Mail
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Up to six million patients are being given the wrong prescription for statins, a study has found.
They are either on the wrong type of the cholesterol lowering drug or not taking the recommended dose.
The mistake could be putting thousands of them at risk of heart attack. Doctors say the situation should be corrected as a ‘public health priority’.
Up to six million patients are being given the wrong prescription for statins, a study has found
They said GPs should avoid keeping patients on out-of-date prescriptions through inertia.
However, patients are being told to wait until they are next due to visit their family doctor, rather than flood surgeries that are already under stress.
Millions more patients are now offered statins to cut heart attacks and strokes under NHS guidelines.
Before 2005, doctors used to prescribe the drugs only to those who had a 30 per cent or greater risk of suffering a heart attack within a decade. This was lowered to a 20 per cent risk in 2005 and to a 10 per cent risk in 2014.
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However, some doctors were concerned, claiming the rules unnecessarily ‘medicalise’ many healthy people, exposing thousands to harmful side-effects while making only a minimal difference to the number of heart attacks and strokes.
Now researchers at Imperial College London have looked at the medical records of 184,000 patients to compare prescriptions against the national guidelines.
Of patients with heart disease, just 6 per cent were found to be on the recommended drug at the right levels and around one in five were not on statins at all.
Just 15 per cent of a second at-risk group were on the recommended medication and 38 per cent were not on any statins.
They estimated that three million patients in each of the two groups were not taking the right medication for their condition.
Millions more patients are now offered statins to cut heart attacks and strokes under NHS guidelines. Stock image
Statins are prescribed to around one in four adults, making them the most common treatment given out by doctors. As many as seven million people in the UK are on them, at an estimated annual cost of £450million.
Guidelines were rewritten partly because of the low price of statins – they cost just a few pence a day. Low-dose statins cost around £1 a month per patient. The draft guidance made it clear doctors should first work with patients to cut lifestyle factors putting them at risk, such as stopping smoking, drinking less, taking exercise and eating a healthy diet.
Patients who take statins were plunged deeper into confusion at the end of last year when the country’s two leading medical journals went to war over the safety of the drug.
The row was triggered by a major review in the Lancet that concluded the pills were safe and their benefits far outweighed any harm.
It was the biggest ever review into their use, but the rival journal from the BMJ cast doubt on the assertions by claiming ‘adverse’ side-effects were far more common than the study implied.
Yet another major study – published in March – added confusion by finding that statins improved the chances of surviving heart attacks.
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