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Biotech / Medical : Biotech Valuation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: IRWIN JAMES FRANKEL who wrote (10470)	2/17/2004 10:12:22 PM
From: Biomaven	Respond to of 52153

IJ, Maybe, although there is a general consensus (maybe undeserved) that lovastatin is not quite as good as Lipitor or Zocor. But once Zocor is generic, it's pretty hard to justify Lipitor. I also didn't suggest that everyone on an SSRI switch to Prozac - there are real differences among that class. But with Zoloft, Wellbutrin and Celexa going off patent that situation will change quite a bit. All-in-all, going down that list of top 10 drug classes there isn't a whole lot of comfort for the big pharma a few years out. Peter

To: IRWIN JAMES FRANKEL who wrote (10470)	2/19/2004 7:59:27 AM
From: rkrw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 52153

Stunning result if it holds. Study suggests novel treatment for heart failure Statins may help even patients with low cholesterol Wednesday, February 18, 2004 Posted: 8:53 AM EST (1353 GMT) Source: Mayo Clinic WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins, which greatly reduce the risk of stroke and heart attack, may also help keep patients with heart failure alive even if they do not have high cholesterol, new research suggests. Heart failure patients who took statins were 55 percent less likely to die during the year after they were prescribed the drugs than patients who did not get them, the team at the University of California Los Angeles found. "Our results were dramatic," Dr. Gregg Fonarow, a professor of medicine who led the study, said in a statement Tuesday. "We were surprised by the magnitude of the additional benefits of statins in patients who were already on standard medications to treat heart failure." Heart failure is a chronic but deadly condition caused by the heart's inability to pump efficiently. It gradually enlarges as it becomes weaker and weaker. An estimated 5 million Americans have the condition, which will kill half of them within five years. It can be caused by high blood pressure, valve disease, clogged arteries or even an infection. Writing in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, Fonarow and colleagues said they found that heart failure patients did better when given a statin drug no matter what the cause of their condition. They analyzed the medical records of 551 heart-failure patients and looked to see what medications each one was given. They then looked at mortality records. They found an overall 55 percent reduction in mortality rate for heart failure patients taking a statin a year after getting the drug. This finding held no matter whether they had high cholesterol. It was also independent of age, sex, other drugs the patients were taking and other factors such as diabetes or coronary artery disease. The next step should be randomized clinical trials in which half of a group of patients gets a statin and half gets a placebo, said Dr. Tamara Horwich. "If randomized clinical trials mirror our results, we may have a novel treatment for heart-failure patients," she said. Statins may work by reducing inflammation, helping to better control the heart ventricles, or by decreasing an overactive sympathetic nervous system, Fonarow said.